The Scare Salon

Director Gary Graver, who worked as a cinematographer not only for Orson Welles, but also for schlock icons Al Adamson and Fred Olen Ray, was later mostly known for directing porn. He funded 1982’s Trick or Treats (not to be confused with 1986’s Trick or Treat with Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne, or the awesome 2015 anthology Trick ‘r Treat) with a little over fifty grand out of his own pocket. It’s apparent that he was trying to make something akin to the popular slasher movies of the era, particularly Halloween (obviously) and When a Stranger Calls, but I have to say that although Trick or Treats is diverting enough, it doesn’t come close to approaching the heights of either of those films and unfortunately tried to add in a dark comedy element that doesn’t really work all that well.

At the beginning of the movie, Joan O’Keefe is breakfasting on the patio with her high-powered executive of a husband Malcolm, who is so engrossed in his Wall Street Journal that he barely acknowledges her existence. Shortly afterward, there’s a knock at the front door, and two men in white coats, holding a straitjacket, stand on the doorstep. Joan quietly lets them in, and there’s an extended sequence where they attempt and finally succeed in hauling a struggling Malcolm off to the asylum. Joan’s smirk and blasé attitude demonstrate that this is all her doing and that she’s somehow been able to convince some doctors somewhere that her husband must be locked away for his own safety and that of others.

The movie then jumps ahead four years, and a pissed-off Malcolm is still in the psychiatric hospital. Joan, meanwhile, has remarried a dude named Richard, and the pair still live in the same house and look after Joan and Malcolm’s obnoxious preteen son Christopher (played by the real son of director Gary Graver). Since Joan and Richard have been invited to some fancy out-of-town Halloween party, they hire a woman to babysit the brat for the night. Said babysitter is aspiring actress Linda (played by Jackelyn Giroux, who was married to Steve Railsback at the time), who gets called in for the job at the last minute, causing her to have to bail on her boyfriend Brett’s opening night performance of Othello, which cheeses him off no end. I’m not entirely sure why the movie had this whole subplot about Linda and Brett constantly calling each other and talking about how the Othello performance was going, because it doesn’t really factor into the plot at all, other than providing a few misdirects about phone calls (since this has a bit of a “prank caller” element to it as well). But whatever.

So Linda arrives at the house, immediately gets groped by John Carradine (as Richard), and is then left alone with the child from Hell. Christopher is really into magic tricks and pranks, and a good sixty to seventy percent of this movie’s runtime consists of the kid playing seemingly endless numbers of pranks on the hapless Linda, including relatively harmless shit like a fake glass of spilled milk or jumping out at her from behind the couch wearing an old man mask, to more extreme gags like pretending to have his finger cut off and faking a drowning in the pool. Linda seems to fall for his tricks way longer than a normal person would, but she eventually gets wise and stops responding to him, even telling him the old “Boy Who Cried Wolf” story in lengthy detail.

While all of this chicanery is going on, Malcolm is plotting to bust out of the asylum on Halloween night to get revenge on the wife who put him away, and to this end, he recruits a fellow inmate to snore really loud to I guess distract the staff…? But it turns out that the whole snoring deal is completely pointless because when the nurse bends over Malcolm’s bed, he basically just strong-arms her down on the mattress and steals her clothes, as well as the wig she happens to be conveniently wearing.

There’s a pretty long series of gags involving Peter Jason as Malcolm wearing a woman’s wig and nurse uniform and heading toward his old family home, but eventually, he comes across a couple of bums (one of whom is Paul Bartel) and threatens to knife them unless they hand their clothes over. He also stops to call his old house several times from a payphone, and babysitter Linda begins to think some maniac is making prank calls and is going to show up at the house to kill her. Which is pretty accurate, as far as that goes.

Malcolm finally arrives at the house and breaks in. And because we need some extra cannon fodder for this supposed slasher movie that has a relatively low body count, Linda has a friend named Andrea (Jillian Kesner, who was Gary Graver’s wife and appeared on a 1977 episode of Happy Days as Fonzie’s girlfriend), who is a film editor and agrees to drop by the house where Linda is babysitting so she can drop off some footage Linda needs for an acting audition. Malcolm, mistaking Andrea for his ex-wife Joan even though the two women look absolutely nothing alike, stabs the shit out of her while Linda is outside looking for Christopher after one of his irritating pranks.

The final fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie is your standard cat-and-mouse chase through the house, with an apparently delusional Malcolm threatening to kill Linda because he thinks she’s his ex-wife, and Linda continually escaping and hiding. At last, both she and the kid lock themselves in Christopher’s room, but Malcolm busts in through another door (this did used to be his house, after all). Linda, though, is somehow able to get Malcolm into the kid’s fake guillotine toy (established in a prank near the beginning of the movie), which she (earlier and apparently offscreen) altered to make it work like a real one. It doesn’t cut Peter Jason’s head completely off, though; he just kinda groans, coughs up some blood, and calls it a day.

So evidently, the killer has been defeated, but not so fast…this is an 80s slasher movie, which means that there has to be one final twist, one little gotcha at the very end. In this case, after Linda and Christopher go downstairs so Linda can call the police, Christopher sneaks up behind her with a huge and apparently very real butcher knife, and the movie freeze-frames as he’s bringing the blade down on her from behind. So yeah, the kid sucked just as much as the movie implied, and it’s also seemingly confirmed that he was a chip off the old (crazy) block.

So I’ll be honest and say that this is no lost Halloween classic by any means. It’s very noticeably low budget, a lot of the acting is pretty cringeworthy, and there’s very little gore and no nudity to speak of. Despite its slasher-style format, the kill count is not that high, and the kills themselves are not very bloody. There’s also little suspense and few scares; we know from the beginning who the killer is and what his motivations are, so there isn’t any mystery in that regard. There’s also way too much time spent on aspects of the story that don’t matter, like the tiresome number of practical jokes Christopher plays on his babysitter, the whole “phone calls about Othello” thing, and a couple of scenes of Andrea and another woman editing a horror film (scenes of which are shown for little reason at all) and talking about how much horror movies freak them out. There are also some attempts at humor that don’t quite land, though I admit I did chuckle at a couple of lines here and there.

That said, this is certainly no worse than some other 80s cheapies I’ve seen and is considerably better than some of those, simply by virtue of all the cool cameos and a fun, unhinged performance by Peter Jason (who looks unsettlingly like Meatloaf here). I also enjoyed the brief shot of the soundtrack albums for Maniac and The Howling in Christopher’s record collection. The movie, despite being called Trick or Treats, isn’t overtly Halloweeny, though Linda does answer the door to trick-or-treaters a bunch of times over the course of the night, so there is a bit of a Halloween vibe to it, even though the plot itself isn’t really as germane to the holiday as it was in John Carpenter’s Halloween or some of the newer anthologies.

If you’re a fan of movies set on Halloween or cheesy slashers in general, you might want to give it a look, but it does sort of drag in the second act, and there aren’t a lot of splashy gore effects or creative kills to really distinguish it from the pack. It’s streaming on Shudder as of this writing, so if you want to add it to your Halloween night watchlist, then check it out and let me know what you think about it.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends. And Happy Halloween!