Census Bloodbath: Low Down Dirty Tricks

Year: 1982
Director: Gary Graver
Cast: Jacqueline Giroux, Peter Jason, Chris Graver
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

I think covering The Clairvoyant yesterday lured me into a false sense of security RE: awesome slasher movie posters. That movie both had an incredible poster and turned out to be a largely incredible movie, which I should REMEMBER is almost never the case. Enter Trick or Treats. Take a gander at that key art up there and you should have an idea of what a trainwreck we're in for.

This is why we can't have nice things!

Trick or Treats takes place on Halloween night. Linda (Jacqueline Giroux) has plans to attend opening night of her boyfriend Brett's (Golden Globe nominee Steve Railsback, who we'll revisit later this month in 1982's Deadly Games and later... whenever in 1986's The Wind) play. The play in question, which stars the extremely white Brett, is Othello. He's playing Othello. In case you're not a Shakespeare scholar, Othello is Black. Thank every god in every religion Steve Railsbeck is not in blackface, but it's still... a choice. Also what kind of crowd a whitewashed performance of Othello gets on Halloween night is beyond me. Anyway...

She can't attend the play because the Agency calls her with a last minute babysitting gig. She must care for a young magic-obsessed boy named Christopher (Chris Graver, who - wouldn't you know it - is the director's son) whose parents are going to a last minute Halloween party in Las Vegas. The parents being Richard Adams (David Carradine, of David Carradine), a lascivious weirdo who flirts with Linda and unzips her shirt, and Joan O'Keefe (Carrie Snodgress), who had her previous husband committed to an insane asylum so she could get his house and his millions.

Turns out that husband is one Malcolm O'Keefe (Peter Jason), who has designs on escaping the asylum and returning to his rightful home tonight!

Whether or not Christopher is the son of Malcolm or Richard is left ENTIRELY unclear. But don't worry. It's not the only thing.

Trick or Treats opens on Joan surprising her husband with a visit from the authorities, who have come to put him in a straitjacket and cart him away. This scene is strangely prolonged, as Malcolm fights against the men, climbing trees, kicking them into the pool, and wrestling away from them any way he can. It's uncanny and strange in the way it goes on too long, but the way the film just sits with it really drove home the visceral, unpleasant nature of the moment. Unfortunately, every other scene in the movie is also prolonged and unpleasant, but to less effect.

And really, there are only three types of scene that the film cycles through ad nauseam until the boring final ten minutes of Malcolm chasing Linda around the house, thinking she's Joan (presumably because the lighting in the movie is so bad he couldn't tell).

The first type of scene is a woman interacting with a man who seems about twelve seconds away from a full-on sexual assault. This unnamed California town is apparently crawling with predators, who will latch onto any woman or man dressed as a woman (Malcolm spends a great deal of the movie in a stolen nurse's uniform - where he got the wig is anybody's guess) and lasciviously come on to her until she escapes his clutches. This is also true of any teenager and even Christopher in certain scenes.

The worst offender is Richard Adams, whose leering come-on I already detailed above. The discomfort is not eased by the fact that David Carradine is giving an immensely odd, aloof performance. He drifts around the screen in random directions, stretching languorous pauses between words. He knows how much better he is than the material, and there's a perpetual wicked glint in his eye of the knowledge that he can get away with performing any damn way he wants, because who is Gary Graver to tell David Carradine no?

And honestly I respect how much he palpably dislikes being in this film, because it makes me feel less alone for finding it a grueling experience.

The second type of scene is the wacky hijinks of Malcolm attempting to make his way home, which shoehorn in a lunatic attempt at comedy that must be seen to be despised. The third type, which forms the bulk of the movie's run time, is of Christopher pulling a prank on Linda with his magic equipment, including at least three instances of faking his own death. This little stinker really puts her through the wringer, not letting up for a single second he's onscreen, trading incessantly between ruthless pranking and acid-tongued quips performed like the kid from The Babadook's acting coach was Rob Zombie.

If the goal of the film was to put us in Linda's headspace of experiencing an intensely irritating child for hours on end, it succeeded. It's a frightful thing to experience, and the movie resolutely refuses to behave like a good slasher and break up the gloom with fun murder sequences. In fact, nobody even dies in the movie until the third act. Only one murder is perpetrated by the killer himself, and it's so poorly lit and edited that it's not even super clear what happened. It's even less of a slasher movie than the same year's Hotline, and in that movie the killer took down literally zero people on screen.

It's clear from the tropes it's drawing upon and the structure it sets up that Trick or Treats thinks it's a slasher and dearly wants to be one, but it's actually just a prolonged, rejected submission to America's Funniest Home Videos. The shoddy, easily distracted script sees to that. Characters just vanish (we never see Christopher's parents again) or keep cropping up without playing important roles in the narrative (we spend a lot of time with Bret for a character who only interacts with Linda over the phone). Hell, the movie can't even keep track of what pet the O'Keefes have! Joan reminds Linda to feed the dog. We never see a dog in the ensuing 90 minutes, but we do get a cat scare.

Focus? She's not home right now.

Trick or Treats is a bottom-of-the-barrel slasher movie, and this is coming from someone who has devoted his life to probing every last splintery inch of that barrel. Literally the only redeeming quality of the film is the fun New Wave song that opens and closes the story ("Help is On the Way" by Horizon, which I can find nowhere on the Internet). OK, maybe that's not true. I do also like the increasingly angry way that Linda deals with the trick or treaters coming to the door, eventually just tossing candy at them and slamming the door. That was cathartic.

But Trick or Treats is a slasher-comedy film that is neither interested in making us scream nor making us laugh. It is, however, interested in having us sit down with Linda as she tells the entire "Boy Who Cried Wolf" story from start to finish uninterrupted. What a brutal, unrelenting, punishing, slog. I almost gave it a 1/10, an honor that has until now been reserved only for the worst slasher movie ever inflicted upon polite society.

But I changed my mind for two reasons. First, bad as it is, Trick or Treats is nowhere near the black hole of irradiated garbage that is The Outing. Second, there's a scene where an editor friend of Linda's agrees to drop off her acting reel because the O'Keefes' house is right by her hairdresser, where she was headed anyway, and I had a fun five minutes imagining what scenarios could have brought her to a salon past midnight on Halloween. Good times.

Killer: Malcolm O'Keefe (Peter Jason)
Final Girl: Linda (Jacqueline Giroux)
Best Kill: As if there even were any to speak of.
Sign of the Times: It cost 35 cents to ride the bus.
Scariest Moment: The part about 80 minutes in when I realize nobody else was going to be murdered onscreen.
Weirdest Moment: Two asylum inmates who think they're Antony and Cleopatra are caught having sex in the men's ward.
Champion Dialogue: "Amigos! A me goes!"
Body Count: 3; and that's reeeally a stretch

1. Andrea is killed with a knife... somehow.
2. Malcolm is guillotined.
3. Linda is presumed stabbed about half a second after the end of the movie.

TL;DR: Trick or Treats is an abysmal slog that doesn't even attempt to embrace the tropes of the slasher genre, let alone resemble an actual narrative motion picture in any way.
Rating: 2/10
Word Count: 1448

Nothing's Fine, I'm Corn

Year: 1998

Director: Ethan Wiley

Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Eva Mendes

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I always knew we'd hit the quality valley at some point in our Children of the Corn marathon. For a franchise with only one and a half entries that got released theatrically, something had to give eventually. The only surprising thing about the fact that it finally happened is how long it took to get here and how short the fall was. Granted, no Corn movie is, like, a masterpiece, but the dip from "surprisingly watchable" to "mostly watchable" isn't as steep as I've been fearing.

I'm just really scared that the longer we wait, the more it's gonna sting when the other shoe finally drops.

In Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, after we see two different couples murdered by possessed child Ezeekial [sic] (Adam Wylie of Child's Play 2) and his gang of corn kids, a group of four college  kids (although one of them is explicitly 17, so she must be one of those Young Sheldons) on a road trip to spread their dead friend's ashes break down in the middle of a corn field just outside of the town of Divinity Falls (lol geddit?). This is the most blatant slasher movie setup we've seen from any of these movies, so the only shocking thing about this structure is how very very long it takes for the murders to kick in after this.

Luckily, we do get our share of shocking plot twists along the way involving the main girl Allison (Stacy Galina), who realizes that her long lost younger brother may have been inducted into the cult of children who worship He Who Walks Behind the Rows (he's back, by the way!) at a local farm run by Luke Enright (David Carradine, who sits down for this entire performance). The other kids have their own sort of drama, but we all know they're just here for body count: we have Greg (Alexis Arquette, rocking a Jamie Kennedy look pre-transition), the nerdy annoying guy whose presence in this group can probably be attributed to the fact that he owns a car; Tyrus (Greg Vaughan), the requisite horndog asshole; and Kir (Eva Mendes, the third recognizable name in the credits, and by far the famous at the time of writing), the girlfriend of the deceased who's a shallow Clueless-esque princess with a rambling pile of hair that you just long to get lost in.

I desperately hope that she and Ryan Gosling have gotten drunk and watched this movie together.

Probably the most interesting thing about Fields of Terror is just how un-interesting it is. This was a slasher film released in 1998, two years after Scream done changed the game and made it a requirement for the genre to be laden with in-jokes and meta humor. This is the year that gave us Bride of Chucky, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween: H20, and Urban Legend, for crying out loud, and this franchise has the audacity to give us a straightforward rural breakdown slasher as if we were still deep in the trenches of 1986. There's something almost wholesome and charming about how unpretentious and standard this whole concept is. Almost.

But let's not forget that the bog-standard DTV slasher flick is exactly my comfort zone, so I'm not pretending that a movie being a mediocre entry in the subgenre brings me anything but joy. I think it's pretty objectively the worst film in the Corn franchise thus far, but it operates at a low simmer that renders it at least mildly entertaining for the bulk of its run time. It doesn't hurt that the cast still features a surprising cadre of reasonably famous actors (Kane Hodder also has a cameo as a bartender in town). Nobody here is saving the movie like Karen Black or Naomi Watts in the previous one, but the sheer act of recognizing a face in one of these movies is satisfying in its own way.

And even the faces you don't recognize are VERY pretty.

And at the very (very) least, director Ethan Wiley (whose previous feature was the infamously titled House II: The Second Story)  is trying his best to spice up the proceedings. Sometimes this means some harsh blue lighting intercut with lightning flashes that creates a pretty sinister mood in an early murder sequence. Sometimes this means turning the camera sideways for no apparent reason other than to have the camera be sideways. It's on and off, but the first shot (a rather elegant slow motion image of a rose being plucked from a corn field) is a pretty solid exemplar of what Wiley is going for an intermittently achieves.

Unfortunately, while no Children of the Corn has been bursting at the seams with cash, the budget seems to have truly strangled this one. There is exactly one showstopping effects sequence that recalls the terrific work accomplished in Urban Harvest, but the way it's shot and edited is too muddy and garbled to really make it worth the effort, and nothing else in terms of effects or kills is especially memorable. There is a silly moment involving dumping a severed foot into a body bag that's fun, I suppose. It's just not really bringing it in terms of the kills, which are oh-so important to the slasher format and oh-so absent from the larger part of this movie.

And it's far too much to ask this film to be scary in the least, but I will say that Adam Wylie easily plays the best child cult leader since John Franklin's Isaac four long movies ago. He doesn't quite manage "creepy," but the flinty command in his voice makes the power he holds over the other kids (especially those older and taller than him) completely believable. It's a potent performance without much nuance, but it's certainly the best in the film, and we all need something to latch onto in a movie like this where creepy subplots constantly crop up and slither away from reach before they can resolve themselves (there's literally a line about a bungee jumping accident maybe being an elaborate suicide that is completely forgotten, when the whole movie could have just been about that).

It's certainly the most frustrating and least appealing of these movies, but a meat-and-potatoes supernatural slasher sequel at least fills you up. I won't be revisiting this one for any reason other than to gaze in wonder at Eva Mendes' hair, but I'm not upset that I've seen it, which is more than I can say for a lot of films in, say, that Amityville marathon from last year.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror is a mediocre direct-to-video effort, but it certainly has its share of corny charms.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1151
Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)