BY TODD GARBARINI

Having been a film fanatic my entire life I was thrilled when, in June 1982, a new magazine burst onto the scene and quickly caught my attention. Devoted exclusively to new and upcoming motion picture releases, Coming Attractions cost $2.50 per issue and was published on a bi-monthly basis. It didn’t last long, unfortunately, but I recall that a bit of an uproar occurred over the cover of the March/April 1983 issue which featured a half-naked Valerie Kaprisky in a promo for the Breathless remake. Seriously, back in the day who complained about a beautiful naked woman on a magazine cover??

In one of the earlier issues, there was an article published about an upcoming horror film entitled Trick or Treats starring David Carradine. I don’t recall the film ever opening in my area and wondered whatever happened to it until I saw it on the shelf as a VHS rental a few years later in a local video store. Trick or Treats is not to be confused with the 1986 Dino De Laurentiis film Trick or Treat, directed by Charles Martin Smith, or the 2007 Michael Dougherty-directed vignette film Trick r Treat. It’s a strange concoction that cannot seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to be. My guess is that it’s attempting to be serious but fails miserably at it. It’s a mixture of horror and absurdist elements that almost play like a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Filmed mostly in Neil Young’s house that his then-girlfriend, actress Carrie Snodgress, lived in at the time on South Irving Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA, the film opens in 1978 and Malcolm O'Keefe (Peter Jason) just wants to read the morning paper, but his wife Joan (Carrie Snodgress) has other plans. Out of nowhere, she has two burly men fight to get Malcolm into a strait jacket while affording no explanation. Their antics are humorous and silly, and we have no idea why it’s even happening. Apparently, he’s being carted off to a mental institution where he stays until 1982 and plans his escape. None of this is even remotely believable as it raises too many questions – is he really insane? How did his wife arrange this? Why would anyone go along with it? Do the doctors know? As he’s planning his escape, Joan is now with Richard (David Carradine, the star of the film, who has less than ten minutes of screen time) and has an eight-year-old son, Christopher (is he Malcolm’s son or Richard’s son from a previous marriage? None of this is explained). Christopher (Christopher O’Keefe) is a practical jokester, an aspiring magician and aficionado of Harry Houdini. Joan and Richard decide to head to Vegas for a Halloween party and call their babysitter, Linda (Jacqueline Giroux), requesting her services to watch him and dole out candy to trick or treaters. Linda is an actress and is torn between seeing her boyfriend Bret (Steve Railsback) in his acting debut in Othello (I swear, I’m not making this up) or making the extra money. She chooses the latter despite Bret’s insistence on her presence at the play. The boyfriend doth protest too much. Richard tries to put the moves on Linda but is stopped by Joan. Despite this, they leave for the Playground of the World, and this gives Christopher all the time he needs to torture Linda by playing jokes on her that she continually falls for: sticking his head into a fake guillotine (remember this for the ending!), using a buzzer while shaking hands, pretending to cut off his finger and even feigning drowning in the family swimming pool. After so many instances of this, one must wonder how dim-witted Linda really is.

Things get really ridiculous when Malcolm escapes by donning a nurse’s outfit – and everyone he meets treats him as though he’s female. He’s a guy with a guy’s face and a guy’s voice! He makes his way back to the house and hides in the attic. Another subplot featuring two additional young women working on a film that Linda appears in comes out of nowhere. One of the women, Andrea (the late Jillian Kesner), goes to the house and spends a lot of time looking around very slowly just to pad out the running time until the final showdown with Malcolm…

If you’re looking for a serious horror film, this one’s going to be a disappointment. The credits even list Orson Welles as a “magical consultant”. I can definitely see the influence of Citizen Kane (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958) on this flick. Yikes! Mr. Welles put his “magical consulting” to better use two years later in the pilot episode of NBC-TV’s short-lived Scene of the Crime series which aired on Sunday, September 30, 1984. In the second story of the pilot, called “The Babysitter” and penned by Jeffrey Boam, the title character is left in charge of a prepubescent girl whom she antagonizes while the girl’s parents go out for the night. The girl gets her revenge in a very cool ending by making a wish to a magician topper that appeared on her birthday cake. That episode was better than this film. Mr. Welles should have put his full “magical” powers to work and made Trick or Treats disappear. The film would have worked better as an episode of Tales from the Darkside, which ran from September 1984 to July 1988 in syndication, and without the camp. Christopher constantly annoying Linda gets tiresome, though I give the film props for the scene wherein Christopher sorts through his LP record collection which consist of the soundtracks to Maniac (1980), The Howling (1981), and the BBC Sound Effects No. 13 - Death & Horror album from 1977 that my friend and I used to play in the early 1980s.

Trick or Treats debuted on DVD in November 2013 and has now been released in high definition on Blu-ray by Code Red (probably the same transfer, though this time it’s more colorful and clearer due to the high definition afforded in the Blu-ray format) with the same audio commentary which runs the entire length of the film and contains five people: Jackie Giroux, Peter Jason, Chris Graver and Cameraman R. Michael Stringer, moderated by Sean Graver. The big problem with the commentary is the audio quality – it’s poorly miked and begins with no introductions at all. It’s also too low. I loved listening to it, but at times I didn’t even know who was speaking. Commentaries as an extra are something that I love on any disc, but if it sounds as though the people who are speaking are on the other side of the room…hey, great title for an Orson Welles movie!

There is an audio interview with actor Steve Railsback that adds little value to the package.

There is something called “Katarina’s Bucketlist” mode wherein the hostess talks about the cast and does an Elvira, Mistress of the Dark-inspired schtick.

There are no trailers, interestingly.

The bottom line: I love a campy horror film, but if you’re going to be silly, make sure that you market it that way. Don’t sell it as something in the same vein (no pun intended, naturally) as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Otherwise, you might feel like Charlie Brown did on Halloween…you go out for candy, but all you end up with is a rock.