31 Days of Halloween - Trick R Treat (2007) - With Pumpkin-Headed Spoilers

Trick R Treat has become a staple of my annual Halloween moviefest, displacing Halloween (1978). It's a fun horror romp. It's bloody, creepy, funny, has zombies, ghosts, demons, werewolves and boobs. Sweet, naked boobs. Perfect!

Synopsis

The entire movie takes place on Halloween night, in Warren Valley, Ohio, a town that throws a huge party for the best holiday of the year. The film follows five different, but interwoven, stories. The timeline bounces back and forth throughout the film. Rather than completely spoil things - and try to explain the timeine - I'll just tell you the basics of each story.

Story One: Emma (Leslie Bibb) and Henry (Tahmoh Penikett) are coming home from the Halloween festival. Emma wants to start taking down their decorations that night. Henry goes inside to wait and falls asleep. He wakes up later and goes outside to check for his wife. Unfortunately, she has incurred the ire of Sam, a child-sized demon who enforces the traditions of the season and serves as a common thread in the stories. Henry finds her mutilated corpse and the opening credits roll.

Story Two: Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker) is a school principal. He finds Charlie (Brett Kelly), an obese and annoying teen, stealing candy and smashing pumpkins. He sits him down to talk to him and gives him a candy bar which has been poisoned. It turns out the principal is a serial killer. There are some shenanigans in the backyard while he's burying bodies involving his unpleasant neighbor Kreeg (Brian Cox). His son, who is around 7, keeps pestering Wilkins to carve a jack o' lantern before he heads to the festival. The segment ends as we find out that dad is teaching junior all about the family pastime.

Story Three: A group of teens is collecting pumpkins to take to the local abandoned, flooded quarry. They are doing so in order to play an elaborate prank on Rhonda (Samm Todd), a girl who appears to be autistic. Along the way, ringleader Macy (Britt McKillip) tells the story of the "Halloween School Bus Massacre," an event from 20 years ago, in which a bus full of mentally deranged children was driven into the quarry. After executing the prank and scaring Rhonda, the zombie-like corpses of the dead children rise from the water to kill the mean kids while Rhonda looks placidly on.

Story Four: Anna Paquin and a group of hotties (Lauren Lee Smith, Rochelle Aytes, and Moneca Delain) are in town on the prowl for men. While the three other girls quickly find "dates" Anna goes for a walk around the Halloween festival. She attracts the attention of Wilkins - who is dressed as a vampire and already killed one girl at the festival. He stalks her into the woods, but when he attacks her, she effortlessly tosses him through the trees, right into the spot where the party is happening. It turns out the girls - and there are more there than Anna and her three companions - are all werewolves and have come to party in their own way. Their way involves picking up guys and killing them. The girls shapeshift and Wilkins dies at the claws and teeth of Anna. Not a bad way to go.

Story Five: Kreeg is under attack from Sam. He battles it throughout his house, but even a shotgun blast to the head doesn't kill the little monster. However, the moment he is about to be killed, he holds out a candy bar. Sam accepts this as tribute and leaves. However, Kreeg is also the bus driver responsible for the Halloween School Bus Massacre. There is a knock at the door. He opens it And sees the zombies waiting for him, with murderous intent. The end.

Analysis

It's hard to be objective about a movie I like so much. There's not a lot of depth to the film; but the point of the movie is not to tell a single story with a handful of well-constructed characters. It is to replicate an issue of a horror comic like Eerie. Five stories, each with sharply drawn but one-dimensional characters. Each story has a tight scripted build-up which ends with a well-earned shock. The effects are well-done. There is no shortage of gore. In short, it is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be, knows how to tell it's stories and had a crew with the technical skills to make it all look good.

I do think that the timeline is a little hard to follow the first time around. I was able to keep track of what was happening when, but some of the people I watched it with had to stop the movie and piece together what they had seen and how it all fit together. Also, you have to like the anthology format and horror comic book sensibilities. If you don't, you'll probably find the film unsatisfying. Keep in mind; you don't have to like horror comic books to enjoy this movie. But you do have to accept that the stories set up a situation, give you some shocks and then wrap things up. Also Keep in mind that the film is only 82 minute along, so each of the main segments (2 - 5) gets about 15 minutes of screentime.

Verdict

Anthologies have to be judged by different standards than a traditional narrative. In general, you'll have more characters and more stories lines with less time to develop them than a traditional film. My standards are along these lines:

1. Does it have a consistent theme and tone? One thing that I find throws me off in an anthology is if you have stories that don't have similar tones (so, if you had one segment that was light comedy, the next grim torture porn) or if there is no thematic core.
2. Do the filmmakers use the limited time in each story to create memorable characters? They probably won't be well-rounded; but, they have to stand out.
3. Does the wrap-up equal the build-up? This is particularly true with horror anthologies. The stories will try to end on a shock. Do they?
4. The usual standards for films also apply: acting, dialogue, cinematography, soundtrack and so forth.

In the case of Trick R Treat the film meets all my criteria for a good anthology.

Check it out.