TRICK OR TREATS

Directed by Gary Graver. United States. 1982.

Gary Graver directed a staggering number of pornos in his life. He made classics like TANGERINE and CO-ED FEVER and porn-horror spoofs like THE SILENCE OF THE BUNS and CAPE REAR. Those last two make a lot of sense, as Graver routinely ventured out of Skin Flick Valley to vacation in the lands of cheap-o horror movies. He directed crap like ROOTS OF EVIL and MOON IN SCORPIO, as well as providing cinematography for a whole slew of cult classics and Fred Olen Ray slop. He even made time to work with Orson Welles and John Cassavetes in between shooting English-language segments for Italian exploitation films. The guy was positively all over the place. I don’t know how he found time to have a family, but he did. I wish he didn’t have the time for this movie, though.

The running time for TRICK OR TREATS is listed at 91 minutes. It feels endless. The movie opens with a woman, Joan, having her husband, Malcolm, involuntarily committed to a mental asylum. Four years later, Joan and Richard, the skeevy rich guy she quickly married after getting Malcolm locked up, are heading to Las Vegas for a fancy costume party. Joan’s fat, obnoxious son, Christopher, needs a babysitter, so Joan hires Linda for the night. Linda is an aspiring actress who needs money for rent as her acting career hasn't quite taken off yet. Her boyfriend, Bret, is also an actor. He’s playing Othello in an off-Broadway show opening this very night. That isn’t important to the plot, but will nevertheless come up time and time again. It's hard to fill 91 minutes when you only have 32 minutes worth of story.

Jacqueline Giroux plays Linda. She starred in a lot of pornos under the name Robyn Whitting, but not in a ‘working’ capacity. The rest of the cast is loaded with faces you’ll recognize if, like me, you have shit taste in movies. Carrie Snodgress, Steve Railsback, David Carradine, the great Paul Bartel, Jillian Kesner, Tara Aire… TRICK OR TREATS is stacked with (questionable) talent. It’s just a shame it wastes all of it on an immeasurably boring parade of annoying nothingness and abject misery. It's like having your teeth pulled by Ginger Lynn Allen. Yeah, it's nice to see her and all that, but she's still ripping my teeth from my skull.

Because this is a horror movie, Malcolm knocks out a nurse, dons her uniform and wig, and breaks out of the asylum. I’d never accuse Christopher Nolan of stealing ideas from Gary Graver, but thinking about Heath Ledger in that nurse outfit does make me wonder if maybe… Nah, I can’t imagine anyone remembering anything from this movie. I’ve seen it at least twice, and I hardly remember a thing. You can’t blame me. There’s simply nothing to remember here. If I didn't take copious amounts of notes, I'd be screwed. I'd have to write about a better movie instead.

Graver’s real-life son plays Christopher, and I have to wonder what the fuck this kid ever did to deserve that level of punishment. The entire film is an endless parade of lame pranks pulled on poor Jacqueline Giroux. Smoke bombs, fake stabbings, fake dismemberment, even fake spilled milk. And Linda falls for it every single time. Endless stupid pranks played on an endlessly stupid woman. At one point, Christopher fakes his drowning in a pool. I’d have beaten that little shit within an inch of his worthless, little life for that one, but no. Christopher goes unpunished the entire film. I would have duct-taped the fat little shit to the wall, then thrown bricks at him.

Every once in a while, we check back with Malcolm wandering around in the nurse’s outfit, stealing a drunk guy’s booze, pilfering a knife from a diner, and beating up a wino for his clothes. We also meet Andrea, Linda’s actress buddy. We eavesdrop on a conversation between her and her editor friend, listening as they fingerwag the gratuitous violence and boundless bloodshed in horror movies. A weird thing to do in a movie with a single murder that doesn’t occur until around the 70-minute mark. For someone unafraid to stick a camera miliimeters away from sweaty assholes and gushing weiners, Graver sure was shy with the bloodshed here.

I think this movie is supposed to be a comedy. Andrea’s editor shows her a scene from her latest movie. It’s a lame farce about a Dr. Frankenstein (dressed as Dracula for some reason) creating a gibbering monster because he forgot to put the brain in the skull before reanimating the corpse. Har dee har har. Did I mention Orson Welles receives a credit as ‘magical consultant’? I’d kick someone’s ass if they attached my name to this fucking never-ending nightmare of a movie.

TRICK OR TREATS is a remake, by the way. A limp-dick one at that. This is a remake of a Peter Collinson flick called FRIGHT, starring the wonderful Susan George. That movie was pretty good. This one is painful. There’s only a single good scene. Andrea pops by to drop off a tape. Unable to find Linda (because she’s fallen for yet another prank, this time outside in the work shed), Andrea wanders around the house. She hears strange noises coming from the attic and decides to check it out. For a brief moment, TRICK OR TREATS is an effective horror movie. Then it's back to being a frontal lobotomy.

This scene leads to our only murder in the film. One death down, only onw more to go.The killer bites it with three minutes left by getting his head stuck in Christopher’s guillotine. First off, who the fuck buys their pre-teen child an actual guillotine? Maybe his parents were praying for an accident. Stupidty aside, to Graver’s credit, he planned far enough in advance to have Christopher’s magic tricks play a role in the finale. So there’s at least an iota of good screenwriting here. Unfortunately, it’s all in service of an endless, tedious, boring, endless, anemic, monotonous, dull, torturous, endless, mindless, lifeless snooze fest. There is nothing worth recommending here. Maybe a small child would enjoy watching a rotund brat torture a porn actress using dime-store magic tricks for 90 minutes, but I sure as shit didn’t.