The Other Side of the
Wind cinematographer/uncredited
director on F for Fake Gary Graver
spent a lot of time hanging out with Orson Welles as an apprentice, learning the
ways of becoming a magician under Welles mentorship, before embarking on a
career mostly directing pornography.
Much like the makers of The Prey
who also ordinarily did porn for a living, Graver sought to try and make a real
film amid his mainstay of outputting smut.
Channeling
his penchant for trickery into something resembling a narrative feature, Graver
wrote and directed the offbeat and peculiar Halloween horror flick Trick or Treats, a kind of slasher/magic
tricks bonanza about a babysitter named Linda (Jackelyn Giroux) stuck watching
a precocious brat (Chris Graver) who proceeds to terrorize the woman with a
never-ending slew of increasingly mean-spirited practical jokes. Think of the ongoing attention getting antics
unleashed in Harold and Maude and you
have a rough idea of what this little monster has in store for our hapless
babysitter.
On
the side is a narrative involving the boy’s psychotic and murderous father
Malcolm (Peter Jason) who escapes a mental institution dressed in drag after
his Machiavellian wife Joan (Carrie Snodgress) has him committed to marry her
true lover Richard (David Carradine in an unlikely cameo). Meanwhile Linda is busy trying to calm the
nerves of her boyfriend/actor Bret (Steve Railsback) when she can’t attend his
stage play as her movie-editor friend (Jillian Kesner) offers to keep her
company for the night. With all the
varied chess pieces slowly coming together, the players are fixing to unleash
bloodshed on a night full of all manners of Trick
or Treats.
An
obviously messy hodgepodge from the outset, it’s difficult to say just what
Gary Graver was going for with this one.
Though ostensibly steeped in the horror genre and being a Halloween
film, it never really becomes frightening and is mostly a comical showcase of
the boy coming up with more elaborate practical jokes to assail Linda with than
David Copperfield. The film doesn’t
really work as a horror film and is all over the map in terms of the scale of
the story, including one oddball sequence where news reporters commenting on
the escapee from the mental institution are overrun by the inmates.
That’s
not to say there isn’t some measure of fun to be had here, as the scenarios
grow more and more laughably ridiculous with time. The opening scene alone of two orderlies
coming to capture Malcolm that spills into and out of a swimming pool for
minutes on end is something you’re not likely to see in any other Halloween
film in your lifetime. On the one hand,
there’s a certain amount of meta horror here paving the way for snarky send ups
like Scream or The Horror Star. On the
other hand, it goes so far all over the map that it’s hard to tell which genre
of film we’re watching anymore.
The
amount of underutilized A-list stars that come and go in this thing will catch
the attention of some though Railsback disappointingly doesn’t go crazy here
like in Lifeforce. As with the filmmakers behind The Prey, the film's writer-director naturally returned to making porn after trying his hand at making a regular film that wasn't directed by Orson Welles. Trick or Treats isn’t
my first choice of film to throw on the TV at Halloween parties, but the
practical jokes are silly and kind of fun.
--Andrew Kotwicki
