Trick or Treat (1986)

Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price) is your typical high school misfit, just bullied rather more cruelly by the jocks than average (well, at least where I come from), and with fewer friends to keep him sane. Obviously, he’s turning into a very angry young man, and is really not terribly far from the mental state that might turn one into a school shooter or something comparable.

The core of his life – apart from a heavy crush on non-mean popular girl Leslie (Lisa Orgolini) is metal, or really, his intense fixation on the hair metal of Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), a hometown hero for the non-mainstream of the town whose plan for a return Halloween high school concert has just been thwarted by that most terrible of monsters, concerned 80s parents. Being a teenager, Eddie takes the poser and his message about “metal warriors” rather more seriously than they deserve. Then again, when your typical school day mostly seems to consist out of being tortured by bullies, and your parents seem to be all too happy to ignore you, Sammi Curr is a rather more attractive alternative, looking good in the little leather he wears.

Things turn from potential school shooting or movie about teenage suicide to metal slasher when Curr dies in a mysterious fire, and a friendly DJ (Gene Simmons) gives Eddie the acetates to Curr’s final, unreleased album. Said acetate apparently hosts the soul of the singer, offering Eddie the power to take vengeance on his tormentors. At first, it’s clearly quite the kick for the kid to see his enemies supernaturally driven before him, but once the things Curr does in Eddie’s name turn from nasty but non-lethal revenge into increasingly brutal and dangerous murder attempts, he decides to put a stop to the bad metal menace. Which, as it turns out, is easier said than done.

For my tastes, the directorial debut of character actor Charles Martin Smith is by far the best of small group of metal-themed supernatural slashers made in the 80s. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s really not Trick or Treat’s fault that the rest of its sub-genre is quite so bad.

Smith never made a horror movie after this, but he shows great instincts for the somewhat overblown 80s version of the genre, working the series of increasingly silly and great set pieces to best effect, milking these set pieces for all the fun his budget is worth. How silly do things get? Let’s just say that this a movie where a Halloween concert by an undead metal musician who shoots lightning from his guitar isn’t even the climax, and a scene of walkman induced ear-melting orgasm is just the flavour of the day.

Uncommon for its sub-sub-genre, Trick or Treat is a genuinely well shot film, too, well-paced, with better acting than you’d expect (plus a terrible and pretty funny cameo by poor, confused Ozzy Osbourne as a TV preacher), and even a script that mostly makes sense when you accept the set-up.

Apart from being a much better film on the level of craftsmanship than other metal horror, this is also an entry in the genre that manages to have its cake and eat it, too, portraying an evil metal musician in league with Satan but not looking down on the music or the fans. In fact, the film’s biggest strength apart from its great set pieces is how seriously and compassionately it treats Eddie, turning the character most films of this ilk and era would treat just as the bullies do into its eventual hero, a young man who realizes when he has gone too far and does everything to make amends. Which is of course today’s normal state in most films and TV shows, but is not a part of the tradition of metalsploitation horror at all.

All that and a big high school Halloween concert that ends in a lot of death? How could one resist?