Trick 'r Treat (2007) Review

Trick 'r Treat (2007) Review

 

Happy Halloween!

Trick 'r Treat is the greatest movie about Halloween ever made. The first time I heard about it, though, the idea that it might potentially be just good never even crossed my mind. I expected it to be bad. After being screened at some festivals it was supposed to be released to theaters in 2007, but was delayed and eventually dumped unceremoniously on home video with little fanfare. I thought the trailer made it look like a terrible direct-to-video production. Warner Bros. did an abysmal job of marketing the film for what it really is: a blend of comedy and horror and everything that makes Halloween special.

In addition to that bad trailer and hearing no one talk about it in a positive light for years, it had another thing going against it for me to be interested: it’s an anthology film, a format that I’m not always a huge fan of when it comes to movies, but for it to live up to the handful of greatest horror anthologies, like Tales From the Crypt, Creepshow, and Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, it had to be something truly special. Well, it is, because it doesn’t follow the usual anthology formula of having isolated stories, all the stories take place on the same Halloween night in the same small town of Warren Valley, Ohio. Certain characters appear in multiple stories and we see repeated moments or events from different perspectives, but one thing that links them all together is Sam. When you think of Christmas, what character do you think of first? Probably Santa Clause, but there are so many others, too, like Rudolph and Frosty and even Buddy the Elf. What about Easter? The Easter Bunny, obviously. St. Patricks Day? The Leprechaun. But then there’s Halloween, which has had many fictional characters associated with the tradition, but never one singular character to represent it, until Sam came along.

You might be thinking, what about Michael Myers from the movie that bears the name Halloween? That’s a well-established franchise that’s been around for decades, isn’t he the more likely candidate to be Halloween’s mascot? I contest that Halloween is a very important film in the slasher subgenre, but it is not the definitive movie about the Halloween season. Sure, it has plenty of things that represent October 31^st, like dressing up, carving jack-o-lanterns, and watching scary movies, but it’s also a story about babysitters who are attacked by a killer, and that is the reason it’s been copied and emulated over and over, because the premise is not integral to being set during Halloween. Back to Trick 'r Treat, the very premise is inextricably linked to Halloween, and Sam is a supernatural entity that keeps the traditions in check. His appearance captures that blend of cute-but-scary you get when a little kid is dressed up in a costume, and what’s under that burlap mask cements his status as the Halloween mascot, which pop culture has slowly adopted over the years since Trick 'r Treat has become more well-known by Halloween lovers.

Because of the nature of its anthology format and its relative obscurity for mainstream viewers, I won’t divulge too many of the plot details, but I’ll explain the individual stories and some of the characters involved. It begins with a married couple returning from a night of partying and establishes the woman is not a fan of Hallows Eve, so you can guess how she ends up. The opening credits are depicted in a comic book style, which makes the character Sam feel like he’s been around for longer than just this movie. He actually spawned from writer/director Michael Dougherty’s short film Season’s Greetings that he made a decade before Trick 'r Treat. The next story follows a fat kid who ends up on the doorstep of Principal Wilkins, and you would think a school principal wouldn’t be the worst guy to be out and about on this Halloween night, but think again! He takes Halloween traditions pretty seriously, which could spell doom for the fat kid, as well as his incredibly annoying son.

The next story follows a group of kids who are trick-or-treating and collecting jack-o’-lanterns, and they end up in the company of Rhonda, a strange young girl who also takes Halloween very seriously, but not in the same way as Wilkins. They recall the urban legend of the Halloween School Bus Massacre and visit the spot where it happened to get a really good scare—maybe too good of a scare. The story that follows is probably the most surprising one, so I won’t say much about it other than it’s about a young woman named Laurie and her friends getting costumes and going out to a party in the woods, and someone or something is following her. The final story gives Sam the spotlight, when he visits the neighbour of Wilkins, old man Kreeg, because Kreeg hates Halloween, so it’s like a dark twist on A Christmas Carol. The final conclusion ties up some loose ends and brings it all home for a final scare that’s almost funny because of how clever it is, but it is also genuinely freaky.

My favourite parts of Trick 'r Treat are the twists you don’t really see coming that reveal unexpected connections between the stories and characters. Even though I know them all now having seen the movie so many times, I still find it entertaining when I watch it again, just because they are so well done. I think Michael Dougherty is a great writer and director, and I stand by my opinion that he was a great choice to make the 2014 Godzilla sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), but I also think he has not made anything else as great as Trick 'r Treat.  It is less than 90 minutes, making it all killer no filler, and is wholly satisfying in a way no other anthology horror film I’ve seen has managed to be. One thing I always end up commenting on it seems in movie reviews is the pacing, and I have to mention it once again, because I think Trick 'r Treat is paced wonderfully. It isn’t rushed nor is it too slow, it has fast-paced scares and slow suspenseful scenes. The whole thing is like a smorgasbord of horror movie delights, and the music is simple but perfect for setting the right mood and tone all the way through.

It might not sound like the kind of movie that would attract big stars, but there are actually a few really good actors in the cast, such as Dylan Baker as Wilkins, Anna Paquin as Laurie, and Brian Cox as old man Kreeg. I love that Cox has played serious roles like in Succession and the Bourne films but he can also be in silly movies like Super Troopers and superhero movies like X-Men. He is great as always, and even though there are a few child actors who are a bit meh, no one stands out as giving a bad performance, and the characters all range from likeable to scary to purposefully annoying, and none of them are a disservice to the movie. I really can’t say enough good things about this movie, but unfortunately, I don’t think I can recommend Trick 'r Treat to everyone of all ages, because it does have dark, gruesome, gross-out moments, some blood and guts, coarse language, and violence. That being said, I can’t deny that’s all part of the appeal and the charm. Everyone is entitled to one good scare on Halloween night, and this could be yours. Hopefully even if you aren’t big into scary movies you will give it a chance.

Trick 'r Treat has finally received the attention from horror fans that it so desperately deserved from the very beginning, but now with the passage of time it has become something new: a definitive must-see for the Halloween season in the same way as so many other holiday-centric films over the years. I have watched this movie more times than any other horror movie on Halloween or during the month of October, and it will always be a Halloween tradition for me to sit down to watch it or at least have it on while I carve a pumpkin.

What is Halloween for, really, if not to remind us all that there are things in this world we don’t understand, events we can’t predict, or chance encounters we can’t avoid? Life is as much of a mystery sometimes as death. None of us are getting out of this alive, but sometimes it’s good for us to be confronted with the uncomfortable, the macabre, the disgusting, and the scary, to remind us we’re still human and we can safely explore these undeniable truths through the world of film on the other side of a screen. What better time to do so?

Happy Halloween, everyone, and goodnight. 

 

Deep Blue Sea (1999) Review

Deep Blue Sea (1999) Review

 

You would think a shark movie that has been deemed one of the best shark movies aside from Jaws (if not the best shark movie other than Jaws) might owe a fair bit to the greatest film ever made to feature a killer shark, right? Well, actually, Deep Blue Sea owes more to another all-time great Steven Spielberg flick, and that’s Jurassic Park, because Deep Blue Sea is a little less horror and a little more of a techno-thriller, but unlike Jurassic, it fully embraces being a B-movie and does not elevate the material to something more than just a killer animal/monster thriller. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not, because it is definitively (not just definitely, definitively) one of the best films in the killer animal subgenre.

A scientist, Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) is being investigated by one of her financial backers (Samuel L. Jackson) after a test subject escapes its enclosure. Her place of research is Aquatica, an underwater facility in the middle of the ocean, and her subjects are genetically-engineered mako sharks. Normally these sharks aren’t that dangerous to humans, as Susan’s shark wrangler Carter (Thomas Jane) explains. The only problem is Susan and her partner in crime, Jim (Stellan Skarsgard) have broken the rules and bred sharks with bigger brains so they can suck more brain juice out of them to create a cure for Alzheimer’s. This results in three extremely intelligent, deadly, and hungry mako sharks, one of which is forty-five-feet in length. A tropical storm botches an aerial emergency evacuation, and the resulting explosion plunges Aquatica into fiery disarray—as well as frees the sharks from their pen. The group of survivors must fight their way to the surface and escape the sinking facility, as well as the relentless sharks.

The performances in Deep Blue Sea are not all great, but the casting is. When you think of Samuel L. Jackson, the first thing you think of is probably him playing a rough and tough dude in a crime movie or a person of authority in an action or drama film, but Jackson has dabbled in his fair share of creature features, too. In fact, one of his first major roles in a summer blockbuster was Jurassic Park. Obviously you can’t forget about Snakes on a Plane, too, but I think Deep Blue Sea is the best B-movie he’s been in. He plays a rich businessman who is famous for surviving an avalanche in the Alps, but there’s some dark mystery surrounding that traumatic event. He eventually lays it all out for the group in order to motivate them to survive the situation they are now in and not lose it on each other. It’s a great speech, but don’t let me give you the wrong impression, because while Jackson is the actor with the most star power in the cast, no one is safe from these sharks. I wonder if the director put all the characters on a roulette wheel and spun it to decide who got to die and who got to live. The characters who stick around longer get a bit more development, but overall most of the people are entertaining. You think you know who will die before the end, but it subverts your expectations a bit, and the majority of the deaths are at least creative or gruesome or both.

Any good killer animal movie has someone who provides much needed comedy relief to give some levity to the situation, and in this one it’s the token rapper/African American character, played by LL Cool J. He’s a chef with a foul-mouthed pet parrot, and he carries my favourite scene: a shark pursues him into his flooded kitchen and he has to evade it. The action is inventive, entertaining, and satisfying, no more so than in this scene. What helps Deep Blue Sea avoid getting boring during the shark-free scenes are the relatable characters and the constant danger everyone is in. In one scene the sharks are trying to eat them, and in the next scene they’re trying to avoid drowning from the sudden flood of sea water as the facility crumbles. The action has a good ebb and flow, but there are some great scares and shocking moments throughout, too. This was one of the earliest R-rated movies I saw, and it thrilled me more than it scared me (for the record, Jaws scared me more), but it doesn’t go too overboard with cursing and explicit gore. It strikes an effective and satisfactory balance.  

There are many far-fetched concepts and moments throughout, but nothing so idiotic that it takes me out of what’s going on. I won’t get into all of it, but I will say the shark “science” in particular is pretty ridiculous. It’s as if the screenwriters watched one episode of Shark Week, jotted down a few notes, and mistook themselves for experts. “Sharks can’t swim backwards!” one of the characters declares, even though one of the makos just did. These sharks are so smart, you see, that they’ve learned behaviours no other sharks are capable of, including sneaking up, breaking through doors to purposefully flood certain levels, and reading the script really well so they show up at just the right time and don’t miss their cues. Not only did the screenwriters get some things wrong, the special effects crew did, too: they painted green stripes on a mako shark and called it a tiger shark, even though it is clearly the same design as the mako. Don’t mistake this for criticism of the SFX, though—a B-movie though it may be, they didn’t skimp on the budget.

Even as a fan of Jaws, I have to admit that the animatronic shark is not one of the best examples of an animatronic creature in a movie. Most shark movies before the advent of CGI relied on animatronics that looked worse than what was in the original Jaws, or subbed in footage of real sharks and tried to play it off like the actors were in the same water, even though they usually weren’t. Despite coming out a few years after CGI had become a new standard for creature special effects, Deep Blue Sea features animatronic sharks, and they are easily the most realistic-looking sharks in any movie ever. There are some shots where the sharks are CGI, and these looked kind of goofy even in 1999, so nowadays they look really bad, but those animatronic sharks are still effective, and the choice of featuring a species different from the standard great white was smart, because the mako shark is, in reality, one of the scariest looking sharks, and while the design isn’t 100% accurate, it’s very close, and very freaky. 

Why, exactly, does this movie owe so much to Jurassic Park? It’s more than just the cutting-edge sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Aquatica is like an undersea version of the theme park, a tropical storm plunges them into their survival situation, the intelligent sharks are like the intelligent Velociraptors (hell, one of them even attacks someone in a kitchen!), Carter is the expert leading them to safety, Susan is the blind mastermind who caused the whole disaster despite good intentions, and it’s more about the action and the thrills than the horror, but still about that, too. I’ve seen it so many times I’ve practically memorized every scene, but I still find it re-watchable despite some poorly-aged aspects, and it is still worth checking out if you’ve never seen it or haven’t seen it in a long time.

Deep Blue Sea is a must-see shark movie. I think it holds up pretty well, but you may not agree, depending on if you prefer more serious thrillers of this nature like Jaws or Rogue or The Edge. Normally I would wrap it up here, but because I’m hoping some readers who read this review don’t know anything about it, I’m going to do a little spoiler section to end off for those who are familiar with it.

Ok, spoilers! I couldn’t do a review of Deep Blue Sea and not comment on one of the most shocking movie deaths ever. You would think Samuel L. Jackson, the biggest star in the movie, would make it to the end, right? Nope! Deep Blue Sea may owe a bit to Alien, as well, because many of the cast members at the time were not well-known, and the filmmakers wanted it to be a guessing game as to who would live and who would become shark bait, as well as have a purposefully unexpected death to really catch the audience off guard. Prior to the third act, LL Cool J’s character makes a comment about how black guys don’t fare well in these kinds of movies—err, situations—but then they do a reversal and, surprise, he actually escapes the jaws of death and survives to the end! Like I said, I’ve seen this movie way too many times, but I have to give credit where credit’s due in subverting the expectations of those who watch these kinds of movies all the time and hooking viewers who might otherwise avoid them. Also, the way the sharks are killed are like mini-remakes of the endings of each film in the Jaws sequel trilogy: the second shark dies by getting electrocuted, just like the shark in Jaws 2, and the first and last shark both get blown up (like in Jaws: The Revenge and Jaws 3-D, with the first one even getting scorched by flames like in Jaws 2). While Deep Blue Sea may not be on a level even close to Jaws or Jurassic Park, it’s still pretty entertaining in its own right, and is a hell of a lot better than any of the Jaws sequels.