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</script></div>{/googleAds}The horror anthology is nothing new; however, its success to failure ratio is a muddled affair at best. Only a few attempts have truly been pop culture landmarks and those are usually relegated to television - namely, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Tales from the Crypt come to mind. When it comes to horror movie anthologies; however, there are historically (and hysterically) more attempts and fewer successes: Creepshow worked well enough and... well... there's Creepshow. So when a film comes along attempting to weave several scary stories together as one film, like Trick r' Treat does, audiences and critics alike join together in anticipation because we want to be scared, we want to laugh at ourselves, and we all like good stories especially when they are cleverly linked. Trick r' Treat is the film we all should be celebrating this Halloween; it's that good.
Crawling out all fresh-and-dead-like from the corpse-ridden ground of the EC Comics burial yard, comes this inspired take on the anthologized horror genre. Equal parts terrifying and funny, Michael Dougherty's script and film (based on his short film Season's Greetings) is the wildest scream-fest to hit the home theatre market. Forget any notion of renting and buying the latest Hollywood teen horror flick, this is the film to see this season.
Originally filmed (and screened) in 2007, Trick r' Treat is a masterful delight of murder and mayhem whose four stories of human bondage and suffering are linked (not only by storyline tie-ins, but) by a strange masked figure of smallish proportions named Sam. This masked figure visits all the locations of the film and goes nearly unnoticed until the final story, that is, the final attack. In each of the stories (including the opening), we are presented with victims (or victimizers) that are dead-on archetypes of the horror genre; however, due to the tone and complexity of the storylines, they work better than any teen-scream gore fest. The anthology of thrills includes the following titled tales: â"The Principal", â"The School Bus Massacre Revisited", â"Surprise Party", and â"Meet Sam". Again, while these stories are separate pieces, the fluidity in getting them to come across to the audience as one whole story is a near seamless act.
Trick r' Treat stars Dylan Baker (Dr. Curt Conners in Spider-Man 2), Anna Paquin (of HBO's True Blood fame), Brian Cox (The Bourne Supremacy), Leslie Bibb, Rochelle Aytes, Tahmoh Penikett, and Quinn Lord as the mischievous Sam. The cast while the stories do intertwine really don't interact with people outside of their storylines and that's part of the charm of this movie and script. Dougherty's movie comes across as a self-contained nightmare belonging solely in the pages of Stephen King's Night Gallery; however, the honest horror is when/how the stories overlap to reveal something pitch-black and darkly dangerous about the real evil lurking in Small Town, America. At that point, Trick r' Treat becomes scary as hell.
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Blu-ray Details:
Screen Formats: 1.85:1
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish, French.
Language and Sound: English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 French: Dolby Digital 5.1.
Other Features: Color; interactive menus; scene access; trailers.
Supplements:
Audio Commentary - with director Michael Dougherty is informative and amusing. It includes interesting tidbits about the movie that help illuminate the connections between each story.
Featurettes
- The Lore and Legends of Halloween (SD, 28 minutes) - This is fun and interesting a perfect match for the film. It includes interviews from the makers and stars of Trick r' Treat.
Additional Scenes (SD, 17 minutes) - interesting and help to fill in the gaps in the storylines as they cross over. One sequence involving a character named Charlie should never have been cut, but included here makes the release near perfect.
Animated Short
- Season's Greetings (SD, 4 minutes) - This is the short film the movie was based upon. It's fun stuff and very imaginative. Not to be missed. There is an optional commentary included with the short from Dougherty.
BD Live! opens a whole new world of special features including an F/X comparison of some sequences of the movie.
Number of Discs: 1 with Keepcase Packaging
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