Harefooted Halloween: Trick 'r Treat

What I Liked: Sooooooo Halloween-y.  This movie is more Halloween than any of the Halloween pictures and most of those are fairly Halloween-y.  You know how in a lot (or even most) Christmas films the town/family/community/homes are decked the fuck out to the max on decorations, trees, presents, caroling, hot chocolate, banquets, snow and all that shit?  We now have an equivalent Halloween movie on that scale (at least in the live action category, The Nightmare Before Christmas is right there too in the animated field).

It’s neat how the stories intersect with each other.  I’m not always a fan of this method of storytelling but it works here.  I think it’s because the different tales don’t really interfere with each other.  They could be told separately (although you’d have to re-edit the movie to get all the pieces of each related story together) but instead we’re shown that all these characters and incidents are happening in the same small vicinity.  This lends a nice cohesiveness to the whole thing.

What I Didn’t Like: I don’t have any real hard negatives to say here.

Overall Impressions: The movie’s fun and all but none of the stories really stand out or excel at the type of horror they were going for.  The child killing school principal, the band of voluptuous ladies looking for a good time, the group of young kids checking out the site of an old school bus massacre, the home invasion, the woman who hates Halloween are all executed competently without much memorable flair.  That’s strange though because the filmmaking is on the slicker side with very moody lighting, great production design and expert camerawork.  But somehow it lacks.  Maybe it’s that I’m not too interested in most of the story segments, or that they’re not unique enough, or that the characters don’t have much depth, or that first time writer/director Michael Dougherty (Krampus) tries too hard with the plot twists.  I’m not sure.

One really bizarre thing is how much child death there is in this piece.  Like a whole slew of kids eat it at various points and that didn’t occur to me until I was talking about this movie with a buddy of mine.  It doesn’t come off so dark or in bad taste though.  I don’t know how they managed that.

Anyway, if you like these horror anthology type deals this fits the bill but it’s nothing to get too excited about.