Post by drblood on Dec 17, 2009 2:26:45 GMT -5
A few things have been bugging me since Trick 'r Treat started appearing in top ten lists for 2009 all over the place. Although it's certainly a horror movie (albeit for kids), I can't really recommend it to anybody (including kids). For the following reasons this movie pisses me off to the point where I'd rather use the DVD to scrape up dried cat faeces from linoleum than ever have to watch it again.
1. It's NOT SCARY! Shouldn't a horror film actually be scary or am I just being stupid here? If it's supposed to be a comedy (or horror-comedy) then it isn't at all funny either.
2. The title annoys me. For years the whiney little voices of American kids in movies have been mispronouncing "Trick or Treat" until it sounds like a single word, "Trickertreat". Ugh! Who is this mysterious "Tricker Treat"? Maybe it's some evil video game character who I've never heard of like the Trickster in "Brainscan" (another shitty movie). Now the little brats will have justification for their linguistic failures and be even more happy to think that text speak such as "UR" is acceptable. I bet they love Toys R Us too. Aaargh!
3. I also hate the way that these Americans (or maybe it's Canadians since Trick 'r Treat was made in Canada) can't say Hallowe'en properly. For that matter it's always annoyed me since John Carpenter's classic that nobody seems to be able to spell it with the apostrophe in either. Whatever the case, the word is not "Holloween". Hollow? You mean like how this movie is hollow, insipid, boring and crap? Ok then, you can use it to refer to Trick 'r Treat but not to the 31st of October. Whenever I hear that linguistic faux pas it just reminds me of the day I overheard a pretentious idiot in the fast food queue who ordered a Fonta instead of a Fanta and got blank looks and/or grimaces from everybody. WTF!
4. Back to the film itself, it was a mess. I hate all that "earlier", "later" and "meanwhile" nonsense. If you can't film a story with events happening in the correct chronological order then don't do it at all. I hate flashbacks, flashforwards and anything that makes my already overtired brain have to struggle when I've just come in from work and only have time to stuff a couple of greasy burgers down my neck, stroke my cat until she's fed up with it and then go to bed in enough time to make sure that I get at least 4 hours asleep out of the 12 hours of insomnia that I know is coming. Yes all that happened earlier, now I'm up and later I'm going back to bed again. See it wasn't that difficult to get things in the right order, was it?
5. The final straw was that there was no characterisation worth mentioning and I didn't care about anybody in the whole film. Ok that may not be entirely true as a couple of the actresses were hotties and something in me really wanted to see the nicer bully guy have some kind of teenage love thing going on with the "idiot savant" witch girl. The hotties really didn't do anything of note though and the child actors (good as they were) also had a lousy script to work with. In truth, if I wanted to see an adolescent romance then I'd watch Twilight or Let the Right One In anyway rather than this passable anthology movie. But wouldn't it have been nice if the idiot girl had been turned normal by her smack on the head and ended up with the guy while all the nastier kids got their cummuppance? Yeah, that's how I would have done it differently if I'd written the thing (which gives me an idea for another series of blogs where I'll rewrite all the movies I hated and turn them into good ones - once hell freezes over).
Bottom line, I didn't like Trick 'r Treat and I certainly don't rate it as a good movie. It's worth about 3 out of 10. Admittedly it's filmed well, the child actors are ok but not exactly in the same league as Stephen King's It or even the little girl in Orphan, and it has a good feel to it. It's just a bit too much on the bland side for me and is only worth renting not buying.
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