Tricks and Treats

Year: 2015

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I was very excited to see Tales of Halloween, a holiday anthology film that features a very unique group of indie directors and actors, many of whom I personally know. I learned a very important lesson from this screening: Don’t write reviews where your friends can read them.

Don’t get me wrong, the film isn’t awful, but the relative quality of each segment makes for some wild swings across either end of the spectrum. At the end of the day, it’s a fun flick with a real sense of community (cemented in by bucketloads of cameos and lots of crossover performers that highlight the fact that every story takes place in the same town) made for the most microscopic of budgets, so it can be forgiven  few flaws. There’s a patch in the middle that is a rough trudge to get through, but it comes out sparkly clean by the time the substantial credits roll.

What follows is a review of each individual segment in order, capped off by a ranking of the worst to the best.

Sweet Tooth

Director: Dave Parker

Cast: Daniel DiMaggio, Madison Iseman, Hunter Smit

A vengeful ghost pursues those who don't save him any Halloween candy.

Sweet Tooth is an excellent place to begin any proper Halloween anthology. It’s intrinsically focused on the childlike perception of the holiday as a night of sweet candy joy laced with spooky figures lurking in the shadows. It also introduces a compelling local legend, a boogeyman used to scare kids away from overindulging on treats. Sweet Tooth is simple, compact, and bloody, just right for a night of cinematic trick or treating.

Fun-Size Treat: One of the candies is called a Carpenter Bar, which is a sly reference to the Halloween auteur but probably doesn’t taste very good.

The Night Billy Raised Hell

Director: Darren Lynn Bousman

Cast: Barry Bostwick, Marcus Eckert, Christophe Zajac-Denek

A young kid attempts to egg an elderly neighbor's house and learns what a real Halloween prank is.

The Night Billy Raised Hell is an organic but regrettable follow-up to Sweet Tooth. It carries on that short’s sense of glib spooky fun with a stellar twist attached, but it’s over marinated in humor There are several reasonably diverting twists on Halloween pranks that escalate to absurd levels, but the short is marred by some truly unfortunate sound design. As the lead actor hams around like a Keystone stooge, wacky effects accompany his every move like he’s on one of those awful wacky radio shows. It’s an immensely frustrating, over-the-top approach to what could have been a taut, reasonably silly piece.

Fun-Size Treat: The final coda as the segment cuts to black is by far the best-timed punch line of the whole film.

Trick

Director: Adam Gierasch

Cast: John F. Beach, Tiffany Shepis, Trent Haaga

A group of drunk and stoned adults is beset by homicidal trick or treaters.

Here’s where things really start to backslide. Trick starts off strong with some deft Steadicam work and impeccable timing, but it swiftly degenerates into a nonsensical twist ending. The twist is bad enough, but it is introduced in a manner so ham-handed that it’s like an entire supermarket meat department topples over your head. This segment is the one where you really start to notice how the actors are indicating more than truly performing heir roles. This works for the basic, sketch-like nature of the film, which needs to set up each story ASAP, but makes the weaker entries even more unbearable to watch.

Fun-Size Treat: A friend of mine’s daughter is a trick or treater in this one, and she’s the most adorable punkin you’ve ever seen.

The Weak and the Wicked

Director: Paul Solet

Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Grace Phipps, Booboo Stewart

A young teen seeks revenge on the hoodlums that wreak havoc in the streets.

This teenybopper revenge tale is a right mess. I have literally zero bead on what the tone is supposed to be. The baddies are intended to be archetypes, but the flit from cliché to cliché without piecing any of it together. Are they dirt biking bullies? Anarchical hood rats? Straight-up sociopaths? Their motivations are obliterated by a startlingly weak reveal that undermines comprehension and ruins any catharsis that may have come out of the story.

Fun-Size Treat: The lead actor, Keir Gilchrist, will forever live in my heart thanks to United States of Tara.

Grim Grinning Ghost

Director: Axelle Carolyn

Cast: Alex Essoe, Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton

A frightened woman thinks she's being stalked by a ghost who kills those who see her face.

This one’s a return to form following two incredibly weak entries. It’s not complex or particularly striking, but it’s eerie and enjoyable with some fun cameos (though I do feel that Barbara Crampton is cruelly wasted here). This segment has the strongest visual sense of the first half of the anthology, making smart use of shadow, silhouette, and encroaching fog to drive home the sense of being followed. The dialogue is a bit oversimplified (“Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t!”), but there’s excellent use of a song and the story clips by at a steady pace. Nothing to complain about here.

Fun-Size Treat: Lin Shaye!

Ding Dong

Director: Lucky McKee

Cast: Marc Senter, Pollyanna McIntosh, Lilly Von Woodenshoe

A barren woman forces her husband to act out a twisted Hansel and Gretel delusion while handing out candy.

Oh man. I almost didn’t make it through this one. The gender politics alone are execrable (a woman doesn’t have a baby, so she becomes a shrieking demonic harpy), but this entire segment is right next door to unwatchable. The wacky sound effects are back, this time accompanying an infuriatingly frequent shot of the lady adjusting her boobs before opening the door to children (why?), the scene frequently cuts to faux avant-garde shots of a four-armed demon lady (why??), and the acting brings to mind the bat guano shrieking of the John Waters-esque aunt from Sleepaway Camp. It’s a shrill, unappetizing descent into madness. Nestled within the various segments in this film, coming across Ding Dong is like the classic Charlie Brown scene: “I got a jumbo candy bar!” “I got a regular candy bar!” “I got a rock.”

Fun-Size Treat: The husband, who looks like he’s 14 years old, is too squeamish to say the word “vasectomy.” Maybe he IS 14.

This Means War

Director: John Skipp & Andrew Kasch

Cast: Dana Gould, James Duval

A polite, orderly neighbor attempts to shut down the raucous party across the street.

An overly simple story that goes absolutely nowhere, at least This Means War feels like a coherent anthology piece, albeit a slightly weak one. There’s a frankly astonishing amount of air guitar, which I’m pretty sure no human being had actually done since 1997, but other than that, this one slides in one ear and out the other.

Fun-Size Treat: The phrase “monster up” is used at though it’s slang that we’re actually supposed to know.

Friday the 31st

Director: Mike Mendez

Cast: Amanda Moyer, Jennifer Wenger, Nick Principe

A slasher villain is visited by a trick or treating alien.

If you survived the gauntlet that is the middle third of this anthology, you earned the bliss that is the next three segments. Friday the 31st is the weakest of the trifecta, but it’s a zany, gooey genre exercise with the world’s most adorable Claymation alien. The pure enthusiasm of this pieces even excuses the extremely silly Monty Python-esque effects, though I do wish that the climactic battle didn’t feel like such a turn-based, unvaried hack ‘n slash.

Fun-Size Treat: “Twick or Tweet!”

The Ransom of Rusty Rex

Director: Ryan Schifrin

Cast: Ben Woolf, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sam Witwer

Two criminals attempt to kidnap a millionaire's son for ransom, but get more than they bargained for.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! With a classic anthology reversal setup, this segment is witty, exciting, and packed with Halloween cheer, propelled by two of the strongest performances of the entire film (American Horror Story’s Ben Woolf – may he rest in peace – and the lead kidnapper), The Ransom of Rusty Rex is quippy, over-the-top fun!

Fun-Size Treat: The millionaire is played by John Landis, director extraordinaire of An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, and Animal House.

Bad Seed

Director: Neil Marshall

Cast: Kristina Klebe, Pat Healy, Greg McLean

An evil jack-o-lantern stalks the streets, devouring those it comes across.

I suppose I intrinsically trust the director of The Descent, only one of my favorite horror flicks of all time, but I have good reason to. This segment is a great end piece to leave the film on a high note. With references to every other segment, Bad Seed simultaneously wraps everything up while telling its own outrageous story. The pumpkin monster is perfectly realized, and the gags produced from the detective’s pursuit of the monster are some of the best in the entire film. And their ending is a pitch perfect final note for both the Twilight Zone-y piece and Tales of Halloween as a whole.

Fun-Size Treat: Axelle Carolyn, Neil Marshall’s wife (and producer of Tales of Halloween/director of Grim Grinning Ghost) is shown being dragged away by cops in the police station.

Official Ranking:

#10 Ding Dong

#9 The Weak and the Wicked

#8 Trick

#7 This Means War

#6 The Night Billy Raised Hell

#5 Friday the 31st

#4 Grim Grinning Ghost

#3 Sweet Tooth

#2 Bad Seed

#1 The Ransom of Rusty Rex

Only the top six are worth watching, but that’s honestly a decent track record for this type of anthology.

TL;DR: Tales of Halloween is an uneven, but enjoyable ode to the October holiday season.

Rating: 6/10, quite literally in this case.

Word Count: 1639

Sins Of The Flesh

Year: 1975

Director: Jim Sharman

Cast: Tim Currey, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Much like 2003's cult classic The Room, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is preceded by its status and thus almost entirely unreviewable. Thus, in lieu of a full review, I will post the media reaction essay I wrote about the film for my Human Sexuality class and attach a mini review at the end. Sound good? 

Why am I asking? You have no choice.

Prompt: Choose a movie to review. Cover the following areas: The movie's portrayal of sexuality, gender, and sexual orientation: using examples from the movie, demonstrate how the movie could affect its viewers and how the movie affected you.

“There’s no crime in giving yourself over to pleasure.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a cult classic celebrated for its cheery camp, low budget charm, and its gaudy excess. In spite of its technical failures, this sci-fi horror musical comedy has captured the hearts of millions of devoted midnight movie fans and currently holds the title for the longest running theatrical release in human history. This is in large part due to the film’s alternative gleeful embrace of alternative sexuality and gender norms, an uncommon theme in 1975 – the year of its release.

The lead character, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, is a hedonistic scientist who doesn’t allow gender, relationship status, or even non-existence impede his lusty pursuits. By the end of the film he has slept with a solid five of the eight characters in his secluded home and would surely have carried on, had his untimely death by laser not killed his sex drive.

However, even more important than his rampant sexuality are the partners with whom he engages. Brad and Janet are vanilla white-bread fiancés, a sweet small town couple that have only ever kissed. But under the thrall of Frank’s spurious advances, both inevitably succumb to pleasure, partaking in the “sins of the flesh.”  Both characters change drastically during their stay at the Doctor’s manor and, after opening the doors to their secret inner desires, are left with nothing, shattered and coughing in the dust.

This is where the film’s treatise on sexuality gets interesting – one by one the characters are subsumed into the orgy of carnal delights. But as the web of sex and pleasure weaves tighter and tighter, each of them finds themselves in a trap of their own creation. The message therein is complex and taut, providing further evidence to the theory that sidelined B-movies are infinitely more thematically resonant than their big Hollywood counterparts.

The film isn’t saying that pursuing pleasure is misguided, but rather that doing so within the context of modern society will wreck whatever that group has built together. Everything is perfect in their orgiastic bubble, but once other factors come into play (like the appearance of Dr. Everett Scott - a figure from Brad and Janet’s past), the merriment screeches to a halt.

But the pursuit of their desires is certainly never looked down upon by the filmmakers. The characters are never directly punished for their actions, merely for their performance in a judgmental society. Their comeuppance stems from jilted lovers and (in an implied finale) once again trying to fit into a world that doesn’t accept their newly warped perspectives of eroticism.

Among these perspectives is an almost total perforation of the line between man and woman. Frank-N-Furter, a self-described “sweet transvestite,” encourages his guests to model after his gender bending ways and they begin to like it. In fact, only after donning fishnets and high heels does Brad ever feel sexy – for the first time in his life.

The film does a fine job of subverting the traditional gender binary right off the bat. After a deliriously heteronormative opening scene at a small town Ohio wedding, Brad and Janet seem to be “on the right path” to becoming another average suburban couple. But the second they step foot into Frankie’s castle, their roles begin to reverse.

The macho behavior Brad displays in the first act is quickly tamped down by his fear of these perverse strangers while the quiet and mousy side of Janet begins to be overtaken by her lust for Rocky (the mad doctor’s creation) and her initiation into pleasure by the (wo)man of the house him/herself. Their masculinity-femininity dimensions become exactly reversed (at least by the standards of the Ohio society that raised them) and their personalities become bifurcated, containing the essence of who they once were but ruled by a new id.

The ensemble’s lascivious finale in the pool fully cements in their gender transformations. Where, in the beginning, symbols of femininity like Frank-N-Furter’s lingerie were viewed as threats (Brad saw them as an undesirable connection between his masculine and feminine sides and Janet saw them as representatives of her “evil” lust and “dirty” genitals), now they allow them access to new heights of sensual pleasure. In addition, Brad and Janet know more about themselves and their desires than ever before.

In spite of their initial reluctance to have anything to do with the castle’s motley crew, their lives and mindsets were changed for the better. Brad became more tolerant and Janet became actualized as an independent and unique individual.

Part of this process of finding a new identity within their gender involved a great deal of exploration of sexual orientation. For all intents and purposes, Frankie is a pansexual transsexual and his search for endless delight knows no biological bounds. His separate seductions of Janet and Brad are pitched the exact same way, evidence that he cares not what lies beneath the sheets, just what he can get out of it.

For what is possibly the first time in the history of film, The Rocky Horror Picture Show accurately displays the spectrum of sexuality and the fluidity of our positions upon that spectrum. While Frank-N-Furter’s boundaries are nonexistent, those of his staff and guests are certainly not so destructible. But despite the apparent hetero- or homosexuality of every character, not a single one of them is closed off to the idea of a same-sex or opposite-sex experience.

Brad will probably never have sexual relations with another man again but he houses no shame about his illicit tryst with the Doctor. In fact, this same tryst was key in his formation as an enlightened individual. And while Janet never directly has a sexual experience with a woman (although she certainly does have her share of the men), the pool finale provides hard evidence against the rigidity of her sexual orientation. And that’s not to mention Magenta and Columbia’s implied lesbian affair (and certainly not to mention Magenta’s not-so-implied incestuous affair with her brother Riff Raff).

The only consistency in the characters’ sexuality is inconsistency. They have affairs with people they connect with, not just people with a certain set of genitals. Again, B-movies must be praised for their insight into the human condition, for it is only in a movie so universally ignored by the common public that this kind of truth can be displayed.

Because of all these views and insights into gender, sex, and sexuality, Rocky Horror has found its niche audience in those with non-heteronormative sexualities and viewpoints. Outcasts, both sexual and nonsexual alike can find their home at these midnight showings because they can relate wholeheartedly to the characters within the film as well as the predicament of the film itself.

They flock together to celebrate their individuality with a film that is nothing but unique.

For fans, a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show creates a pocket universe separate from the ironclad constraints of conservative society, much like the one that Brad, Janet, Frankie, and Rocky enjoy.

But among other subsets of viewers, Rocky could potentially engender chaos (pun absolutely intended). Conservative suburban mothers viewing the film would be absolutely shocked at the lewd behavior displayed both onscreen and off. Far from being a learning opportunity about the validity of alternative sexual methods, Rocky Horror is so over the top that it may increase resentment toward the very activities it seeks to support and encourage.

If the message was transmitted in blander material, it wouldn’t reach anybody, but the way it is presented can be dangerously alienating to those who haven’t been primed to receive it. This could include any group of people from the aforementioned suburban mothers to homophobic fathers, hard-headed policemen, closed-minded seniors, and just about anybody who has influence in a closed-minded community (which is in fact, the very community the film vilifies).

But for me personally, Rocky Horror presents pure pop culture magic. I fall into the subculture of non-heterosexuality so I am a natural fan of the project, but beyond that I have an infinite appreciation for the scope of human experience this one terrible film manages to cram into itself. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is absolutely bursting at the seams with meaningful messages about the state of modern sexuality, both intentional and unintentional but all massively important.

The success of the film has a lot to do with that and the increasing mainstream acceptance of gays, lesbians, transgender, and bisexual individuals has a lot to thank Rocky for due to its widespread popularity within an increasingly un-cult market. As more and more people are pulled into its vast orbit and as those people begin to have kids, there is a weakening of the societal bonds that ensnare LGBT youth as well as any and all alternative lifestyle individuals like punks, skaters, musicians, or even visual artists.

Rocky Horror is about accepting yourself for who you are and letting your freak flag fly. It isn’t healthy to keep your Self in a cage and the environment that the midnight screening crews have created is one of absolute acceptance of every Self anybody has to offer. This celebration of human existence (for humans are – in essence and of necessity – sexual creatures) is what appeals to me the most about this long classic film, despite its many many many obvious shortcomings.

A gaudy and insightful camp classic at best and an earnest attempt at embracing sexuality at worst, Rocky Horror is a win-win as far as I’m concerned. The sheer amount of love and understanding in each grain of film will forever be embedded into my heart, and those of others.

I fervently wish that Rocky stands as a cultural tentpole for years and decades to come. And as long as people keep attending and celebrating, this is a positive tradition of celebrating the human condition that promises to continue long after we’re gone. And that is something I can only think about with a grin.

Thank you, thank you. And now for a quick review.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is perhaps the best known cult film in the entire world. Based on a West End musical written by Richard O'Brien so he could afford his rent, it turned out to be a smash hit in the midnight community and has been playing weekly since April 1976, making it the longest running movie in the history of cinema.

The musical film could have flopped phenomenally but let's thank our lucky stars that it didn't. The film is usually looked down upon as a crappy B-picture, but it has this going for it - the music is spectacular. Regardless of the budget and the continuity and the acting and everything else it has going against it, the music was written by somebody with passion and heart and the unforgettable tunes that drive the story along are a key factor in the film's success. It's impossible to overemphasize how important the songs (especially The Time Warp) are to the fun factor. 

I really don't want to tax your reading abilities after that long essay, so I'll wrap this up quick. Rocky Horror is an experience that, even if you don't personally enjoy it, is a must on the bucket list of every single person alive. You have to go. At least once.

It's the perfect cult film - catchy tunes, dumb dialogue, lots and lots of sex, and big stars before their breakout roles. I adore it and I've seen it too many times to count.

That said, to be completely honest, there's something a little off to me about the audience participation aspect of the midnight screenings. I think what bothers me is that if you don't know the script, you're left floundering with no room to maneuver. The beauty of riffing on The Room is that it's relatively new so there's still areas where you can improvise, but with Rocky you either know it or you feel like an alien in a vast sea of shouting.

For that reason and that reason only, I knock off a point. But as one of the initiated, I can say I truly enjoyed my recent experience at the Long Beach Art Theatre and simply can't wait to do it again.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 2167

Reviews In This Series

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Sharman, 1975)

Shock Treatment (Sharman, 1981)