Trick Or Treat

Flashing back on some 1980s heavy metal horror

Happy Halloween, Jagged Time Lapsers!

Next to Christmas and my birthday, Halloween is my favorite celebratory time of year — but I just haven’t really gotten into the groove of it this year. Maybe I’ve just been too busy with life and book stuff, or maybe horror fiction and films just doesn’t pack quite the same thrilling frisson at a time when so many of my fellow citizens are enthusiastically supporting demagogues, fascists, insurrectionists, bigots, misogynists, white supremacists, Putin apologists, Hitler admirers, grifters, book-banners, and/or election/science/history/climate change deniers in their bids for election. (Oh for those innocent days when ghosts and ghouls were about the scariest things I could possibly imagine.)

In any case, getting into the spirit (so to speak) has been difficult. Other than ol’ Memento Maury above, I haven’t put out any Halloween decorations, and I had to skip the awesome Halloween party I was invited to in order to attend last Saturday’s Dust & Grooves book release festivities. (Totally worth it, but still...) With the exception of Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest,” I haven’t gotten around to reading any horror fiction; I haven’t really listened to much of the Jagged Time Lapse Halloween Playlist that I curated for y’all last October; and I only just bought my first “Autumn Mix” bag of candy corn two days ago. A pathetic showing, really; Vincent Price’s Prince Prospero would surely have tortured me for it.

Speaking of the late, great Mr. Price, I’ve also watched far too little in the way of horror films this fall. My initial plan was to skip the usual AIP, Hammer and Universal favorites and concentrate on things I’ve never seen before; but while I was able to catch up on a few old Italian horror titles that were new to me — like Brunello Rondo’s Il Demonio (1963) and Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill (1966) — and really enjoyed Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ new Late Night with the Devil, this October’s fright flick viewing time still fell well below my seasonal average.

---

---

So why, then, did I spend 98 minutes last week watching 1986’s decidedly-less-than-classic heavy metal horror comedy Trick or Treat?

Well, some of the blame has to go to my friend Liam, the co-host of In Film We Trust, my favorite film podcast. A few weeks back, Liam reached out to me to see if I had any thoughts to share on Trick Or Treat, as he and his co-host Wayne were covering the film for an upcoming episode.

I’m always a little surprised to learn that anyone remembers Trick Or Treat. In the 38 years since I’d last seen the film, it’s only come up in conversation about once a decade — most memorably in 2006, when I was interviewing Seattle metal band Himsa for Guitar World magazine. One of the band’s guitarists went by the nom de rock of Sammi Curr, which I recalled was also the name of Trick Or Treat’s rock star villain, as played by actor/dancer Tony Fields.

“So, uh, Sammi,” I ventured at the beginning of our interview. “Have you ever seen a film called Trick Or Treat?”

“DUDE!!!” he practically screamed into the phone. “Yes! I love that film! No one ever gets the reference!” It was like I’d cracked a secret code; if Sammi’d been a genie, he would have granted me three wishes right then and there. (As it was, it broke the ice and we wound up having a really fun interview.)

But some of the blame for me rewatching the film also lies in my own sense of nostalgia. Because once Liam jogged my memory, I realized that I actually had quite a few happy associations with Trick or Treat, and I decided to revisit the film and see if it still held up at all… or if it was even worse than I’d remembered.

I originally saw Trick Or Treat the weekend of its release in October 1986, with some of my best college pals — I’m pretty sure Don, Chris, Judd and maybe David were there with me, though I could be forgetting a few. The film was playing at the Juliet Theatre, the tiny old movie house right across from the Vassar College campus; we had previously caught such cinematic masterpieces as American Ninja and Death Wish 3 there, so it’s not like we went in expecting Citizen Kane. A film that put a heavy metal spin on the popular eighties slasher genre just seemed like some enjoyable Friday evening entertainment, something to get stoned and go see before heading out to various campus parties.

I don’t have much of an appetite for slasher films these days, but I was always down for a bit of trashy gore back then — the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and 1982’s Basket Case being two of my favorites of the genre. By the mid-eighties, however, American slasher flicks had become overly campy and formulaic (“Hey! Let’s find even more novel ways to kill teenagers who are having premarital sex!”), causing me to seek out weirder low-budget and foreign horror offerings from the sixties and seventies. (My interest in such celluloid treasures was greatly aided and stimulated by my discovery of Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.)

In other words, I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot out of Trick Or Treat from a horror standpoint; and even though my friends and I were greatly amused by the idea of a heavy metal horror film, we kept our expectations as low as our pre-screening buzzes were high. We were all metal fans, to various degrees, but our tastes generally ran to the harder, heavier and thrashier end of the spectrum — Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer, Motörhead, Ozzy/Sabbath, etc. This was a Hollywood film, after all, so we figured that any music involved was going to be pretty cheesy, and that the filmmakers’ attempts to co-opt heavy metal culture and slang would be fairly cringe-worthy. And with Gene Simmons of KISS prominently billed in the film’s print ads, we walked into the theater pretty well-prepared to laugh.

And laugh we did, for a number of reasons — including the screen presence of Marc Price, whom my friends all recognized from TV’s Family Ties and thus found hard to take seriously as the film’s leading man — but I was surprised at how often we laughed with the film instead of at it. First-time director Charles Martin Smith (whom I knew as an actor from American Graffiti and The Buddy Holly Story) and at least a few of its five screenwriters (including an uncredited future X-Files co-writer James Wong) clearly understood heavy metal and its place in contemporary popular culture, cleverly riffing off the “Satanic panic” that surrounded metal music at the time. They got the joke, and so did we.

A bit of historical context for folks who don’t remember: Trick Or Treat was released a year after the infamous PMRC/U.S. Senate hearings that led to the affixing of “Parental Advisory” to albums with potentially objectionable lyrical content, lest American youngsters be subjected to the allegedly corrupting influence of rockers and rappers. This was also a time when self-appointed guardians of the public morality were losing their shit over the possibility that metal musicians were subliminally embedding backwards audio messages into their records, which would then influence their fans to commit acts of violence against themselves or others (and, of course, usually in the name of Satan).

Trick Or Treat is clearly influenced by these hot mid-eighties topics, and has a great deal of fun spoofing them. For instance, the first time we see Sammi Curr, he’s testifying before Congress about the grotesque nature of his act, and angrily tearing some uptight politician a new asshole. Then, after Curr accidentally dies in a fire, his number one fan Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer (Marc Price) plays an acetate of Curr’s final album Songs in the Key of Death backwards, and realizes that his late hero is actually sending him hidden messages FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE.

Further fun comes from the ironic casting of Ozzy Osbourne as Rev. Aaron Gilstom, a clean-cut Christian preacher who rages on television against the current popularity of heavy metal. (At the time the film was being made, the former Black Sabbath frontman was being sued by parents of a teenager who had taken his own life while listening to Ozzy’s 1980 song “Suicide Solution”.) “Whatever happened to the good old simple love song?” Rev. Gilstom whines, whereupon a revived Sammi Curr magically reaches through the TV screen and throttles him.

But Trick Or Treat doesn’t just send up the pearl-clutchers of the day; it also realistically (and rather empathetically) captures how just being a heavy metal fan could turn you into a social outcast among your high school peers. Sure, it’s a little goofy that Ragman spends so much of his free time writing soul-baring fan letters to Sammi — at least while the rocker is still alive and living (for some reason) in Hoboken, New Jersey — but mostly he’s just a sensitive, likable, good-natured kid who generally keeps to himself at school.

Alas, the mere fact that Ragman enjoys heavy metal is enough to make him the target of a vicious bullying campaign led by popular kid Tim Hainey. Played with plenty of uptight douchebag rage by Doug Savant, Tim is the sort of cocky, privileged asshole who believes that Phil Collins and Huey Lewis & The News rock plenty hard enough for the needs of today’s teenagers, and clearly feels that anyone who requires music with additional shred should be abused at every available opportunity. So when Sammi’s revived spirit initially helps Ragman get some slapstick-oriented revenge upon Tim and his other tormentors, the audience cheers — but it soon becomes clear that the undead rocker is just warming up…

Inspired by my conversation with Liam, I watched Trick Or Treat again the other night. Though much of the film is about as flimsy as I’d remembered — and much of the dynamic between Ragman, his best friend Roger (played by future X-Files co-writer Glen Morgan) and Ragman’s crush Leslie (played by Mia Sara lookalike Lisa Orgolini) seems to have been liberally lifted from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — it at least moves along at a rather brisk clip, and parts of it are genuinely funny.

Listening to Liam and Wayne’s podcast afterwards — I’ve embedded the link below — I’d also have to agree that Trick or Treat does an excellent job of juggling horror and humor, which is never an easy task. The late Tony Fields still comes across as believably malevolent in his role as Sammi Curr, even if his slinky stage moves sometimes make him seem like a shock-rock version of Paul Stanley crossed with Prince circa Purple Rain. It was interesting to learn from the IFWT podcast that there was talk of turning Trick or Treat into a horror franchise like Halloween, Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street — and Sammi into a horror icon like Michael, Jason or Freddy — but that those plans were scotched when the film failed to ignite at the box office. (I’d also agree with Liam that my initial assessment of Gene Simmons’ brief performance as radio DJ “Nuke” was way too harsh; like Ozzy, he’s just playing against type, only Gene’s role is more low-key and less humorous.)

I still feel the same way today about Trick or Treat as my friends and I did back in 1986, which was pretty similar to how we felt about the first Poison album: it’s unquestionably ridiculous, but still highly enjoyable. But other than inspiring us to bark “NO FALSE METAL!!!” at each other for the first few weeks after we saw it, the film didn’t really stick with us, largely because — just as we’d suspected going in — the music wasn’t very good. Sammi Curr is supposed to be evil incarnate, yet he comes back from the underworld sounding like... Fastway?

We spent the entire walk back to campus that night discussing which bands would have been better for the job. Obviously,Metallica and Slayer were already too big for consideration; but Mercyful Fate, Venom, Metal Church, Impaler or Possessed (the latter two of whom had albums that are glimpsed in the film) all came up as far scarier-sounding options that the filmmakers really should have considered.

To this day, I'd really love to know how Fastway ended up with the Trick or Treat gig. No disrespect to Fastway, who were initially founded by UFO’s Pete Way and Motörhead’s “Fast” Eddie Clarke (though Way never actually recorded with the band), and whose frontman Dave King turned out to be a lovely chap when I interviewed him in the nineties about his Celtic punk band Flogging Molly… but there’s nothing remotely evil-sounding about the tepid Aquanet boogie Sammi essays while wasting the attendees at the high school’s big Halloween concert.

I get Liam and Wayne’s point that the filmmakers or the producers wanted music with more mainstream appeal, but Fastway hadn’t troubled the US charts since 1983. Liam looked into their connection with the film for the podcast, but found nothing — other than that the band was tied into the project from early on. In fact, W.A.S.P.’s Blackie Lawless was apparently up for the Sammi Curr part, but turned it down because he didn’t want to lip-synch to Fastway. Can’t say I blame him.

But for all its flaws, Trick or Treat has (much to my surprise) nonetheless garnered something of a cult following over the years, at least enough to motivate Germany’s NSM Records to release a limited-edition three-disc Trick or Treat set in 2014. And now Synapse Films in the US has dropped a limited edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray reissue of the film for the prince(of darkness)ly sum of $66.66. I haven’t owned a DVD player in years — about three moves back, I decided to limit my collecting to vinyl records — but it still gladdens my heart to know that Sammi Curr lives again.

Here’s the IFWT episode on Trick or Treat — it’s a good time, and it’s interesting to hear a perspective on the film from a couple of Scottish film buffs who weren’t old enough to see it when it first came out. Check it out; and if you think of it, suggest a good horror film that I should watch tonight in the comments below…

(And if you’re a US reader, don’t forget to get out and vote, if you haven’t already!)

---