It takes a lot of chutzpah to try and create a new movie maniac, especially within the framework of a Halloween-centric slasher film that reimagines many of the established “rules” that such films have existed by for more than 40 years.
It should come as no surprise to genre fans that director Patrick Lussier and screenwriter Todd Farmer (“My Bloody Valentine,” “Drive Angry”) are responsible for “Trick.” Their previous work showed they love gore and extreme violence, but “Trick” is a much leaner, meaner and more cohesive adrenaline rush than their past films.
“Trick” essentially takes the ending of John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” when Michael Myers is shot and falls off a second-story balcony, only to immediately disappear after being labeled as the ‘boogeyman,’ and imagines what that scenario might look like in present day.
Trick
4 out of 5 stars
Rated: Unrated
Run Time: 97 minutes
Directed by Patrick Lussier
Starring Jamie Kennedy, Omar Epps, Tom Atkins, Ellen Adair, Kristina Reyes, Thom Niemann, Max Miller
Now playing in select theaters and on most streaming, Video-on-Demand platforms
Now playing in select theaters and on most streaming, Video-on-Demand platformsHow would law enforcement approach a masked serial killer in today’s society? Would they consider that the suspect might actually be a supernatural entity? And how would the public respond to such a villain, especially with all of the technological advances that now exist?
“Trick” opens with a gut punch. It’s October 31, 2015, and a bunch of students are playing a variation of spin the bottle at a party in a small upstate New York community. One student, Patrick Weaver (Thom Niemann), known as Trick to his peers, goes batshit crazy, killing five classmates, until he is stabbed by Cheryl (Kristina Reyes).
At the local hospital, Trick breaks free, kills a handful of orderlies, gets shot five times by the sheriff and an FBI agent, falls out of a second-story window and, somehow, manages to crawl to the river and escape.
The sheriff, Lisa Jayne (Ellen Adair), and the agent, Mike Denver (Omar Epps), discover that Trick is literally a ghost. There are no photos of him. The only contact his school had with his parents was through email. Even his home address is an abandoned barge.
The next Halloween, more people are killed. And again in 2017 and, again, in 2018. Every Halloween brings a new massacre in a different nearby community.
As Trick’s legend grows, an online cult forms, full of outliers who believe he is actually a malevolent spirit manifesting in human form.
Even Denver starts to question whether they are pursuing a man, or a monster. “This is beyond abnormal,” he tells the sheriff. “He murdered your deputy with the headstone of an agent I got killed. Who does that? What does that?”
Lussier and Farmer are clearly having fun playing with viewer expectations and conventional horror tropes. And they refuse to shy away from the gory good stuff as Trick’s attacks escalate with savage precision. One fantastic sequence begins with a vicious decapitation, followed by a character losing five fingers just before being brutally stabbed.
Once the film reaches present day, the focus returns to the same community where the first massacre took place. Trick has unfinished business there, namely Cheryl, the student who tried to kill him years before, and Denver and Sheriff Lisa Jayne.
A good chunk of the third act is set inside a haunted attraction run by Talbott (the always reliable Tom Atkins), and it’s simply masterful. Lussier and Farmer use every available inch of the haunt to maximum effect, sustaining tension throughout, and Atkins brings some much-needed comic relief.
The central question — is Trick human or not — is finally answered following a series of brazen attacks in multiple locations that make him look almost omnipotent.
And though “Trick” gets a little wordy in explaining how that kind of mayhem is possible, it doesn’t detract from what Lussier and Farmer have accomplished.
The film closes with a tantalizing premise that firmly sets up a second installment, and I for one really hope that a sequel gets made.
“Trick” is everything you want in a horror movie. Even better, it’s the perfect film to discover at this time of year because it embraces and extolls the magic of Halloween in a way that few recent films have accomplished.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2019.