Trick ‘r Treat

Directed by Michael Dougherty, Trick ‘r Treat follows several characters, including Dylan Baker’s Steven, Anna Paquin’s Laurie, and Brian Cox’s Mr. Kreeg, as they experience a series of horrific happenings over the course of one especially eventful Halloween night. It’s compelling subject matter that is, for the most part, employed to lackluster and surprisingly tedious effect by Dougherty, as the filmmaker, working from his own script, delivers an uninvolving, erratically-paced endeavor that contains few elements worth wholeheartedly embracing – with the movie’s inability to capture the viewer’s interest and attention due preominantly to Dougherty’s surface-level approach to the various subplots (ie all of these stories, with few exceptions, feel underdeveloped to an often egregious degree). And although the picture admittedly does contain a very small handful of compelling interludes, especially a strong flashback detailing the fate of a doomed school bus, Trick ‘r Treat‘s palpable lack of forward momentum ensures that virtually all of its scares remain unable to make the creepy, memorable impact that Dougherty has obviously intended – which, in addition to ensuring that the whole thing peters out long before it arrives at its thoroughly anticlimactic conclusion, cements the movie’s place as a predominantly disappointing piece of work that squanders its relatively promising setup.

** out of ****