what's Sackboy doing in a horror film?

I’m not a big horror movie fan. Though I like the history and story of quite a few series, I’m still not someone who watches that type of movie very often. Yesterday I made an exception and watched “Trick ‘r Treat” with a friend.

The movie was made in 2007(and was supposed to come out in October 2007 as well), but it was just recently released on DVD/Blu-Ray(October 6th 2009). It got quite a few screenings in-between. But it ended up being a direct-to-DVD release. And it was reviewed fairly positively as well. I watched the trailer just before watching the movie and it looked not too bad.

So is this something that will one day be considered a Halloween classic, or should it be forgotten as soon as possible?

Read on!

The Plot
The movie actually has 4 stories. Before those stories, it opens to a couple who is done trick or treating/partying, and coming back home. The wife closes the light in her jack o’ lantern, and, while cleaning up the decorations, she gets violently murdered.
The first story involves a school principal killing people randomly with poisoned candy. That’s just about what that one is.
The second story involve a 22 year old virgin girl (a college student) and her friends trying to pick up guys. This one has a really weird twist ending.
The third one involves kids going to a rock quarry, where a bunch of kids were murdered in a bus a long time back. They try to play a prank on a “retard” but the plan backfires.
The fourth has to do with Sam (the sackboy lookalike on the movie’s cover), who is attacking a man named Kreeg for “unknown” (but pretty obvious) reasons.

Each story is intertwined in some way, all of them happen at the exact same time and in the same area, and some characters from each story appear in other stories. Including the couple from the introduction. And all of them include Sam, the not so creepy sackboy clone, who is usually over-seeing every story, or just watching what is going on. It’s not exactly clear why he’s doing it and what his motives are, but he’s always there. He’s basically there to force people to continue the Halloween traditions, otherwise he kills them. Pretty brutal. Each story has a moment that can be seen in the other stories, or are linked to something that happened in another one.

The whole story isn’t told in chronological order, opting for… showing scenes in completely random order. They all take place on the same evening, probably in a range of about an hour or 2, might be less. Needless to say it gets a bit weird when the movie is constantly saying “Earlier that evening” or “Later that evening”, and seemingly at random too, though there is a pretty.

Each story isn’t too great. The first one is clearly just comedy, with a Principal killing kids and telling them about Halloween rituals. The second one includes a “vampire” bitting people to death, but who ends up in a deadly situation when he bites the virgin girl (played by the girl who plays Rogue in the X-men movies). The third story is just really stupid. A bunch of kids go to the rock quarry and talk about the bus incident there, where a bunch of kids ended up drowning in the river below, and the bus driver escaped never to be seen again. Then(after the flashback) the kids try to prank the “retard” girl they picked up on the way there and end up getting killed. Off-screen. By zombies. The fourth story is about the neighbor of the principal, who was attacked by “something” during the Principal’s story segment, and now you actually see what happened. He has a dark secret and disrespects every Halloween tradition, so Sam comes in to teach him a lesson. That’s about it.

Not much here I can say without spoiling too much.

My impressions
Well, since I can’t talk too much about the story without spoiling everything, here’s my impressions of the movie!

Well… It’s stupid. Really stupid. Each of the stories are intertwined, and they actually work pretty well together. And each has some pretty obvious references to each other. That element is pretty well done. But the problem here is that there’s tons of build up. Literally nothing happens in the first 40 minutes of the movie. And I’m being completely serious here. And in the end the payoff is completely stupid, pointless and predictable. There’s really nothing much to it. When the movie ends, all I can find to say is “wait… that’s it?” It ends abruptly (it ends with the beginning of the very first scene of the movie) and explains nothing really. It just… shoves random events in your face and expects you to accept them.

The characters are a mess. None of them are enjoyable in any way. The Principal is kinda funny and weird, but that’s it. The other characters come off as… cliche and stupid. They’re just really boring. There’s nothing wrong with the way the actors delivered them really, they did a good job, but the writing was really bad. The dialogue was boring and the overall plot makes little sense.

Special effects? Well, there’s the weirdest Were-wolf transformation scene I’ve ever seen. The transformation involves them ripping off their human skin, showing their were-wolf selves. I thought it was one of the weirdest parts of the movie, but it wasn’t badly done at least. Also, you see Sam’s actual face (under the “sackboy” mask) and it looks completely stupid. It’s all CG and pretty crappy. There’s one effect where he’s thrown to a wall, but it’s clear that someone just kicked a mannequin towards the wall, it just looks so fake and unnatural. And completely out of place too. There’s a part where a dismembered hand is “walking” around, and it’s pretty well done. Not sure if it’s CG or live-action, but it seems CG. The effects are a mix of “okay” and “horrible”.

Oh, and the sets looked really good too. They did a good job with the environments and houses and such. The overall atmosphere was pretty nice.

Overall
It really wasn’t good. Wikipedia says the movie had a 12 million dollar budget, but it doesn’t look like it was done using any more than a 100k$ budget. The effects are pretty cheap, the actors are nothing special and none of the performances stand out. The script is incredibly lame and the story sucks and doesn’t really have a point. I guess the whole budget went for the werewolf scene, and the sets…

You know what this is? It’s a high-budget B-movie. It looks like a B-movie, the story is very B-movie-like, the effects look just right out of a B-movie… except there’s really nothing good about it. Some B-movies have that campy feeling to them where you just see they had fun making it and showed lots of effort to make the movie despite the low budget. Some B-movies are just made of pure awesome. This one though just feels like a half-assed B-movie.

Sure, the art direction isn’t too bad, and the sets are really nice, but a movie needs a lot more than that to be good. And for a horror film, it definitely was not scary. There weren’t even any jump scares. It was kinda funny at parts where it shouldn’t have been. I mean, there’s a very Bugs Bunny-like moment during the movie’s “climax”(if you can call it that), which feels completely out of place. It’s a disappointment on almost all ends, and I have no idea why it’s being reviewed this positively. Especially considering how everyone who rented it at the same time as me at the video store we rented it asked for a refund because it was crappy. Reviewers are giving it 8/10 overall, but I feel it deserves no more than 5/10. It’s not even average. It feels like the whole movie is a big joke.

The Save Factor
1 penny.

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