I have been looking forward to seeing Trick R’ Treat since 2006. I have been writing about my frustrations with its release for nearly as long. On Tuesday, the film finally got a commercial release, albeit on DVD. I think I registered for MySpace basically just to connect with Mike Dougherty and get his perspective on the film’s life in limbo.
That Trick R’ Treat and All The Boys Love Mandy Lane have gotten the treatment that they have here in Region 1 is criminal. I know I hold forth about what horror, as a product, fails, but it’s never more obvious or egregious than in cases where talent and vision conspire to make a good film that is marginalized or, in the case of poor Mandy, never actually sees the light of day (seriously, when are we getting at least a DVD date? The last time I communicated with Jonathan Levine, he was optimistic that Senator was giving the film a big push, one that has never materialized).
But I digress.
I was afraid that Trick R’ Treat would disappoint, given the years of build up I had for it. Mike Dougherty has created an instant classic, and any Halloween or horror fan should watch it at least annually. I haven’t recommended a film this wholeheartedly since maybe Skeleton Man, but I love Trick R’ Treat without even a hint of irony.
Trick R’ Treat is a must-see, plain and simple. It’s not a horror film as much as it is a holiday movie about Halloween. In many ways, it’s a spiritual successor to Shane Black’s Monster Squad. The movie is made up of a quartet of interlocking tales – Dylan Baker plays a high school principal with a sinister hobby, Brian Cox is a haunted and cantankerous old man that hates the holiday, Anna Paquin is a college girl looking for a special man for her first time, and then there are a group of kids that play a prank that goes wrong. None of the stories in and of themselves are groundbreaking, but they are all excellent and thoroughly entertaining homages to the holiday and the genre, and their intersections between each other are enriching and make for a strong spine that binds the anthology together without relying on a goofy Cryptkeeper stand-in.
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I saw an interview with John Landis recently and he was gushing about the film and totally flumoxed that it wasn’t getting a theatrical release. This is the problem you have when studios are run by business school grads and no one who worked their way up through show business like the old moguls did.