Trick or Treats (1982)

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Kid terrorizes his babysitter.

Linda (Jacqueline Giroux) gets a job as a babysitter to a bratty kid named Christopher (Chris Graver) who spends the entire night scaring her out of her wits with a relentless barrage of practical jokes. Unfortunately there is an even more sinister threat out there in the form of Chris’s long lost father Malcolm (Peter Jason) who has escaped from a nearby mental institution, where he was wrongly committed by Chris’s evil mother Joan (Carrie Snodgress) so she could be with her new boyfriend Richard (David Carradine). Malcolm has spent 15 years with a pent up rage and plans on taking it out on anyone that he finds inside the home.

First we’ll get to the two parts about this mess of a film that I liked. The scene where Malcolm gets accosted by two men from the mental hospital isn’t bad. The idea that two muscle bound hunks would drive over from the nearby sanitarium and strap on a strait-jacket with no questions asked to someone that the wife conveniently wants to get out of her life is ridiculous of course, but I liked the way the Malcolm character fights back and puts up quite a feisty effort to escape from them, which is interesting because so many horror movies never show the victim putting up much of a struggle. I also enjoyed the brief bits with Steve Railsback as an insecure actor getting ready to play Othello. Railsback hasn’t been known for his comic skills, but he proves quite amusing here.

The rest of the movie is as bad as any movie ever made and easily ranks in the top three of worst moves I have had the displeasure of seeing in my lifetime. Not only is there no horror, but the attempts at employing some misguided humor is even worse. The scenes inside the mental hospital are particularly lame and the kid, who was the son of the director, gets really annoying. The babysitter proves to be no better as she stupidly falls for his dumb practical jokes too many times until you start rooting for the killer to off her along with the stupid kid.

The film was written and directed by Gary Graver who had worked closely with Orson Welles as his cameraman during many of his later projects. Here though he proves to have no talent at all and this would be considered a complete embarrassment to even a novice filmmaker, which is probably why he ended up directing only porno movies after this. The most horrifying thing about it is having to sit through it and it in no way deserves the Blu-ray release that it got especially when there is so many better movies out there that have yet to get one.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: October 29, 1982

Runtime: 1Hour 32Minutes

Rated R

Director: Gary Graver

Studio: Lone Star Pictures International

Available: DVD, Blu-ray