TRICK OR TREAT (1986)

DEAD HEAVY-METAL ROCK STAR HAUNTS 'TRICK OR TREAT' IN ALMOST GENIAL - WAY

Seattle Post-Intelligencer - October 28, 1986

Author: Janet Maslin The New York Times

Haunted houses, demonic pumpkins, spirits from the great beyond - so what else is new this Halloween?

Haunted rock stars, that's what. ''Trick or Treat,'' which opened in Seattle last weekend, is about a deceased heavy-metal star who returns to wreak havoc at a small-town high school. The rock star is played most energetically by Tony Fields, who stomps through the film in studs and low-cut black leather, scaring everyone he sees. Ozzy Osbourne, who does this kind of thing in real life, appears in the film briefly (and none too convincingly) as a minister.

''Trick or Treat'' was directed by Charles Martin Smith, who played the likable nerd in ''American Graffiti'' and has given his own film something of a likable nerd quality. It's genial, not too frightening and even rather sweet.

Its main character is a teen-age heavy-metal fan named Eddie (Mark Price) who's so ardent a follower of the dead rock star that he discovers a hidden message by playing the star's last record backward.

This becomes the latter-day equivalent of rubbing a magic lantern. Soon the star is appearing to anyone who makes the mistake of playing his tapes or records - even to Eddie's mother, who is one day tidying up the metal-studded dog collars in his room when she accidentally turns the stereo on. One teen- age girl, who is inadvertently exposed to the music, actually melts.

''Trick or Treat,'' which also has a cameo by Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss, is knowing and sometimes even funny about heavy-metal music, its attendant paraphernalia and its adolescent mystique.

As a horror film, though, it's very tame, with slow pacing and a dark look interrupted by frequent bursts of lightning. The mildest thing in the film, paradoxically, is its music, which is mostly by a group called Fastway. The terrible rock star is at his least imposing when he starts to sing.
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MOVIE REVIEW- `Trick or Treat' is a feeble attempt at horror

The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - October 28, 1986

Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF

"Trick or Treat," a feeble imitation of "Carrie," will play into the hands of fundamentalists who believe that rock 'n' roll music is satanic. Record burners will love this movie for its propaganda value.

The notion that vile messages are dubbed onto recordings in reverse so that they can be understood by playing the record backwards - a process called back-masking - is accepted at face value. This is an allegation that the music industry has been trying to refute for years.

The story takes place at a high school which has even more cliques, more meanness and more nasty pranks than the school in "Pretty in Pink." Eddie, the nerdiest and loneliest student (played by Marc Price), is tormented by gangs of muscle-bound preppies. (In the real world, don't snobs ignore "creeps?" Far from spending their days thinking of ways to humiliate Eddie, real preppies would studiously avoid taking notice of him.)

Eddie is deep into heavy-metal music and is distraught when his hero, Sammi Curr, is killed in a fire. From a sympathetic disc jockey, Eddie acquires the master copy of Sammi's final album. He takes this home and, by back-masking, summons forth the spirit of his idol, who exacts a terrible revenge against Eddie's enemies. Eddie attempts to stop Sammi's maraudings, but Sammi's power steadily increases. In a scene stolen straight from "Carrie," Sammi causes mayhem at a dance held in the sch ool gym.

"Trick or Treat" marks the directorial debut of Charles Martin Smith, an actor who usually plays homely and wimpish supporting characters, notably "Terry the Toad" in "American Graffiti." Smith is a nice guy, but movies, especially horror movies, require a director with bite. Smith doesn't have any. He is no more suited to being a director than he is to being a leading man, as the expensive failure of "Never Cry Wolf" demonstrated.

Smith can't be accused of going for glamour casting. Marc Price, who plays Ed die, is best known as Skippy on "Family Ties." Price looks like a boy who can't get a date for Saturday night. He is colorless beyond the requirements of the role. When the prettiest girl in school takes an interest in him, you can't believe it.

Tony Fields, who was in the movie of "A Chorus Line," plays Sammi Curr with enough makeup and leather paraphernalia to make Ozzy Osbourne seem tidy. The real Osbourne, who is unrecognizable with his hair slicked back and wearing business clothes, makes a cameo appearance as a right-wing preacher denouncing rock 'n' roll on television. Hundreds of professional actors could have played this role with more zip - remember what Paul Sorvino did as the windy evangelist in "Oh, God!".

"Trick or Treat." A horror movie. Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Rated R for profanity, violence and nudity
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Teen's fiendish idol lends a hand in `Trick or Treat'

Houston Chronicle - October 27, 1986

Author: JEFF MILLAR, Staff

From the newspaper ad, you have every reason to believe - geeze, I did - that "Trick or Treat" (rated R) wouldn't be worth paying Federal Express to send it to the Crab Nebula. And, son of a gun, if that hummer wasn't pretty good.

"Trick or Treat" is a teen-market horror film, but it's got intelligence and a lot of malicious humor.

Eddie is a head-banger, which is argot for an admirer of heavy-metal rock. You see them in malls: Sallow adolescent males who wear black T-shirts with death's heads or "AC/DC World Tour" logos, chrome-studded leather wristlets and hair that's been six days since washing.

No matter where you encounter them, they walk as though they expect to be told to leave. So, they try to claim their space with a dip in their shoulders as they stride a little longer than seems natural.

It's paltry and unconvincing arrogance, but it's all they can come up with. You seldom see them with anybody else, and you almost never see them with girls.

At his high school, Eddie is regularly hazed by a cadre of blond jock types and is available on an as-needed basis to most anybody else who needs someone to torment. One of Eddie's female torturers - in what, to her, is mercy - tells Eddie that he might have more friends if he weren't so creepy. She's right.

He wants friends, but he "is" creepy. And he's so committed to the lifestyle codified by his choice of music (among adolescents, you ar e what you listen to) and has retreated so far into it for nurture and remedy of his loneliness, that he doesn't know any way out.

The narrative and most of "Trick or Treat's" set pieces are basted together from bits of other movies, hijacking Stephen King most blatantly. The film makers have pulled off a very neat trick. They make the galaxy of rip-offs appear as though we aren't supposed to notice they're rip-offs and then acknowledge, as subtext, that they "are" rip-offs.

Eddie's idol is Sammi Curr, a cutting-edge head-banger of the demonic school who kills and eats snakes onstage. Sammi is supposed to play a concert at Eddie's high school, which is also Sammi's alma mater, but that's nixed by Moral Majority types. Then Sammi dies in a hotel fire.

Eddie is devastated by Sammi's death; then he's put through a period of especially cruel hazing by the blond jock types. And a quasi-sympatico girl to whom he's attracted appears to have set him up for a hazing session.

Then Eddie comes into possession of a

unique studio acetate copy of an unreleased Sammi album. Eddie discovers that by playing certain cuts of the record backward, Sammi talks directly to him.

Soon, Eddie has tapped into enough of Sammi's demonic power to have gained satisfactory revenge against the blond jocks. But he can't cut Sammi off. Sammi soon materializes and bursts out of Eddie's stereo speakers.

Sammi can travel anywhere he wishes via electric wires or radio signals and, like Janis Joplin felt about her high school, he's got grudges.

It is not a good idea to hack off a dead, demonic, heavy-metal singer who can reach into TV screens and yank the images out of them, which is dreadfully upsetting to talk-show guests back in the studio.

One of the better in-jokes: The Moral Majority preacher in a talk-show scene is played by rocker Ozzy Osbourne, stuffed into double-knits and complaining about Ozzy Osbourne. Sammi reaches into the screen and rips the preacher's head off.

The finale to "Carrie" isn't the finale of this film, but it's in there.

"Trick or Treat" was written by Michael F. Murphy, Joel Soisson and Rhet Topham, from Topham's story, and directed by Charles Martin Smith. It's the first time out as a director for Smith, the actor who played the nerd in "American Graffiti" and the naturalist in "Never Cry Wolf." He's got tools. There's wit in the screenplay, but it's Smith's sense of pitch that maximizes the cleverness. Smith is past the beginner stage; it takes a veteran's panache to know when to go deadpan.

"Trick or Treat" is very well-acted by Marc Price as Eddie and Tony Fields as Sammi.

Again, again, the old caveat. People who have to go to the movies fall like a parched Arab upon a oasis when given the gift of movies that aren't - thank you, lord - as bad as they could be.

Note the subject matter of the film. It ain't Lubitsch
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`TRICK OR TREAT` HAS STYLE, WIT WITH HORROR


Sun-Sentinel - October 30, 1986

Author: BILL KELLEY, Staff Writer

Here`s something we haven`t seen in a while -- a horror film that isn`t loaded with blood and gore. What`s more, it`s even a pretty good movie.

Trick or Treat ponders, with wit and a fair amount of style, what would happen if one of those heavy-metal rock stars who are supposedly corrupting our youth really did have links to Satan, somehow perished in a fire, and was brought back to life by a teen-age fan whose loyalty knows no bounds. The rock star is one Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), whose Halloween appearance at his own high school alma mater has been banned by the town fathers; the fire is caused by a black ritual performed in Sammi `s hotel room; and the fan is Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price), a withdrawn teen-ager who constantly is terrorized by a popular gang of yuppie roughnecks.

Out of this not-so-original premise, actor Charles Martin Smith (seen in Never Cry Wolf and as the nerdy Terry the Toad in American Graffiti), making his debut as a director, has fashioned a lively, intermittently suspenseful horror thriller. Smith is no James Whale (Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein) or even Terence Fisher (the Hammer horror series), but he shares their knack for having fun with the genre without thumbing his nose at it.

Smith also manages to get some effective, credible performances from his cast, all of whom look at home in their roles -- particularly Price and Fields, who demolishes everything in sight as the satanic rock star. Smith even makes us accept the device by which Sammi is revived -- playing a demo copy of his latest record backwards. And he has cast two rock musicians in appropriate cameos -- Gene Simmons as a disc jockey and Ozzy Osbourne, in a suit and with hair slicked back, as a right-wing anti-rock crusader.

But the most refreshing quality of Trick or Treat is that, notwithstanding a substantial body count, Sammi`s victims are dispensed with a minimum of bloodletting. You`ll remember that distinction long after the movie, which fizzles after about an hour, is over.

MOVIE REVIEW

2 stars 1/2 Trick or Treat

A withdrawn teen-age boy brings the dead leader of a satanic rock music band to life.

Credits: With Marc Price, Tony Fields, Lisa Orgolini, Doug Savant. Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Written by Michael S. Murphey, Joel Soisson, Rhet Topham. rated r Nudity, violence, profanity.

1 star Poor, 2 stars Fair, 3 stars Good,4 Excellent
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`TRICK OR TREAT SHORT ON APPEAL

The Record (New Jersey) - October 27, 1986

Author: By Will Joyner, Staff Writer: The Record

MOVIE REVIEW @ 1/2 TRICK OR TREAT: Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Written by Michael Murphey, Joel Soisson, and Rhet Topham. Musical score, Christopher Young; performed by Fastway. With Marc Price (Eddie Weinbauer), Tony Fields (Sammi Curr), Lisa Orgolini (Leslie), Glen Morgan (Roger), and others. Produced by Michael Murphey and Joel Soisson. Released by De Laurentiis. Opened Friday locally. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R: nudity, profanity.

"Trick or Treat" is like a large bag of candy collected on Halloween. It's plenty tantalizing at first, but loses most of its appeal long before you've finished with it.

Charles Martin Smith, who in "American Graffiti" played a classic teen-age geek of the Sixties, here debuts as a director with a promising story that features a teen geek of the Eighties. Despite a lot of supernatural shenanigans, though, the inspired spirit of Terry "the Toad" Fields never enters the body of one Eddie "Ragman" Weinbauer, a nerd looking for revenge on Lakeridge (read "Anywhere"), U.S.A.

Eddie played with misplaced seriousness by Marc Price, best known as Skippy, the butt of Michael J. Fox's barbs on TV's "Family Ties" is a pasty-faced guy who shuffles through school with hair down in his eyes, a skull on his T-shirt, and heavy-metal sounds pulsing into his head. The popular types call him "creepy. "

At home he inhabits a dark lair complete with pet rodent, fine stereo equipment, and posters of rocksters who sing about death and the Devil. His top hero is the scandalous Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), who also endured a tortured adolescence in Lakeridge.

When adultdom bars Sammi from returning to his alma mater to play for the Halloween dance, Eddie gets angry. When Sammi then dies in a fire, Eddie gets angrier. When a local deejay gives him the sole copy of an unreleased Sammi Curr record, Eddie gets truly twisted. As his shockingly normal friend Roger (Glen Morgan) says, the kid is "one quart low. "

"Trick or Treat" becomes a low-budget marriage of "Faust" and "Frankenstein" when Eddie makes and breaks a pact with Sammi Curr's ghost, which inhabits the rare recording and occasionally emerges to murder in an electronic fury.

The movie is initially interesting because Price carefully proves Eddie to be a sweet fellow whose heavy-metal habit has more to do with insecurity than psychosis. But the make-believe horror element, when it finally comes, runs counter to this characterization, turning the teen-ager into a manic goof. The pacing is uneven, and the content is an unsettling mixture of laughs, pale special effects, bad rock and roll, and stagy deaths.

One on level "Trick or Treat" is intended as a statement about the effect of questionable rock lyrics on young people, and about freedom of speech. (Heavy-metal superstar Ozzy Osbourne makes an ironic, if odd, appearance as a fundamentalist calling for censorship.) The screenplay, though, makes this statement almost as incomprehensible as many of the lyrics themselves
ROCKERS' 'TRICK OR TREAT' BLAND HALLOWEEN FARE
Boston Globe - October 25, 1986
Author: Tom Long, Globe Staff
"Trick or Treat" is a remarkably bloodless horror flick with a heavy- metal soundtrack and a plot as predictable as the seasonal appearance of low-budget "shockers."

First we meet rock star Sammi Curr, a fundamentalists' nightmare in heavy mascara, leather and chains. His gig at Pender High is canceled because of his predilection for biting the heads off snakes during his show. Curr is not without his fans. When he isn't being humiliated, sworn at or stomped on, high-schooler Eddie Milbauer, a real nerd, turns the stereo up loud and worships the ground Curr walks on.

Curr meets his earthly reward in a hotel fire. Eddie is beside himself with grief -- until he starts playing Curr's record backward and receives a message from beyond. The message is spelled r-e-v-e-n-g-e.

The resulting mayhem is more boring than frightening. Action sequences are telegraphed, and victims are bloodlessly dispatched in a puff of electrical smoke. The film is devoid of both suspense and horror , and unremarkable except for a brief cameo appearance by shock rocker Ozzy Osbourne, a performer purported to be no stranger to biting the heads off animals as part of his act. Osbourne plays Rev. Aaron Gilstom, a fundamentalist preacher who rails against pornographic rock.

Predictably, Eddie the nerd and Curr the zombie converge on Pender High just in time for a Halloween costume party and a rock concert that really knocks 'em dead but wouldn't scare a fly.

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'TRICK OR TREAT' ROCKS WHEN IT SHOULD SHOCK

San Jose Mercury News (CA) - October 25, 1986

Author: GLENN LOVELL, Mercury News Film Writer

AS every satirist from Swift to Garry Trudeau has demonstrated, the best way to defuse the ranting moralists in our midst is to take their finger-waving to an absurd extreme.

The new horror entry, "Trick or Treat" (now playing), does just this by showing rock music as not only an unhealthy influence on the young, but, as long suspected by the Jerry Falwell flock, a devious tool of the devil as well.

That's right, Mom and Pop's worst fears of coded satanic messages and sadomasochistic dust covers come true here. The hero, an anti-social weirdo named Eddie (Marc Price), takes sweet revenge on school bullies by following the orders of the late great Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), a rabid rocker in the Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper mold who perished in a fire but has been reincarnated on an acetate demo left with the town deejay (KISS' Gene Simmons in a change-of-pace nice-guy role).

By playing said record in reverse, Eddie is able to communicate with Curr, who, like his young fan, was treated shabbily by classmates at Lakeridge High. The more Eddie spins the magic record, the stronger Curr gets -- until he's reborn in a shower of sparks from the kid's stereo speakers.

Mom, meanwhile, shakes her head in disapproval. Eddie, now the last word in leather and spikes, should have been weaned from AC/DC and Black Sabbath long ago, she frets.

A perfect gimmick idea with more than a passing salute to the possessed youngsters of Stephen King, "Trick or Treat" should have been one of the funniest scares of the year. Unfortunately, it isn't. Actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith (the nerds of "American Graffiti" and "Never Cry Wolf") has turned this timely play on adult paranoia into a run-of-the-mill shocker with subpar demons and lame special effects.

This film needed someone as crafty and demonic as the music itself. Smith, who obviously doesn't have his heart in exploitation horror , plays down the fright elements and (thankfully) the gore, and delivers a plodding variation on some of the teen comedies by John ("Breakfast Club") Hughes.

Still, there are some fun in-jokes. Like the casting of rock's premier bad boy Osbourne as a TV evangelist railing against the suggestive lyrics of "pornographic music." Striking his most uptight, judgmental pose, he whines, "Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned love song?"

TRICK OR TREAT. STARRING GENE SIMMONS AND OZZY OSBOURNE. DIRECTED BY CHARLES MARTIN SMITH; SCRIPTED BY MICHAEL S. MURPHEY, JOEL SOISSON, RHET TOPHAM. R (PROFANITY, NUDITY). (star) 1/2