Out of Season

Netflix recently kicked a horror movie recommendation my way, Trick 'r Treat. Made on the cheap a few years back, its distribution deals fell through and the thing finally trickled out directly to DVD. Not a great pedigree, you'll agree. And yet, there are a few interesting faces that pop up in it. Brian Cox and Anna Paquin are featured, along with that fine character actor Dylan Baker (who I'd just seen in Fido). There's even a touch of geek cred in Tahmoh Penikett, of Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse.

So what is Trick 'r Treat, exactly? Well, it is what it sounds like, a horror movie set on Halloween night. And while yes, the definitive movie with that premise has already been made, there's a quite different approach here. The movie is actually an anthology of five different tales, each with peripheral connections to the others. Each story features at least a passing appearance by the creepy little dude in the poster at the left, "Sam." (That's Samhain, the character of folklore used here as the patron-demon-saint of Halloween.)

In a way, this movie is like watching five episodes of Tales from the Crypt stitched together. And for the most part, they're what I'd consider pretty good episodes. Each tale has a fun flavor to it, good moments of tension, reversals, and general horror movie goodness. One story in particular, about a bunch of kids staging a prank related to a fabled fatal bus crash in local town history, is really damn effective.

But the problem is, none of these stories is even given as much room to breathe as an episode of Tales from the Crypt. The entire movie is less than 90 minutes long, and it seems like some of the storylines get short shrift. Once or twice during the movie, I felt myself going "hey, I was watching that!" when one plot would suddenly be abandoned in favor of another. Sure, not all of these stories could actually have sustained a whole film on their own, but they're all presented with enough art and fun that I wished for more than I got.

Perhaps the whole thing would have landed better if I'd actually watched it "in season," closer to an actual Halloween. I think if you like scary movies, you'd probably want to do exactly that. But overall, the "short attention span" approach of the film brings its score down to a C+ in my book. The whole is less than the sum of the parts.