Trick (2019) is a Real Treat For Horror Fans
It’s September 5 at the time of my writing this, the unofficial start to us horror fans favorite time of the year; the spooky season. Time to dust the real cobwebs off the fake ones, and show our love of horror to the world.
Certain movies can do this as well to evoke the feeling of the season. You have your standards, Halloween, Trick R Treat, and every so often a new entry to that canon comes out, sometimes with little to no fanfare. As was the case with this movie, Trick, which was released last October in theaters and on demand, and it went mostly unnoticed by the community to my knowledge.
Cut to a year later and in 2020 we need fun horror movies like this one to take a break from the all too real horror of every day life. I stumbled onto this movie on Hulu trying to find a good scary movie to watch. And what I found was a true homage to the slasher genre with some elements of a good detective story as well, in short, Trick was a real treat.
Trick stars Omar Epps (Scream 2, Love and Basketball) as Detective Mike Denver. He gets called in after a high school Halloween party turns into a massacre, after Patrick “Trick” Weaver (Thom Niemann) goes on a killing spree wearing a two faced jack o lantern mask. In the hospital Trick escapes custody and is seemingly shot and killed by the detective and Sheriff Lisa Jayne (Ellen Adair- Homeland) .
Each subsequent year there’s another massacre on Halloween in the town, and Detective Denver is sure that its Trick, who survived somehow and is taunting him, all leading to one very eventful Halloween 2019.
I’ll admit I went into this movie with lower expectations, was just expecting some schlocky horror cheese we can watch and poke fun at, but what we ended up getting was a smart movie with a script by Todd Farmer (Drive Angry, My Bloody Valentine 3D) and Patrick Lussier (Drive Angry) that was an homage to the slasher genre, with elements of the Halloween and Saw movies.
This movie felt like three sequels all rolled into one which somewhat took away from the overall story. It felt a lot to me like the story that George Lucas had the big idea for Star Wars and was told to break it down into just one part and make that his movie. This could have done the same and it could have been a better film, as characters have arcs that feel unexplained, like we’re missing information here that would have been more fleshed out if each section of this movie was its own movie.
Omar Epps was really good as the Dr. Loomis to Trick’s Michael Myers. I honestly did not expect him to be one of the leads of the movie, as in my experience when these kind of low budget horror movies get made you get a big name actor to have an appearance in the movie to give some credibility to it but they only have a small role, and this was not the case here. We do get some of that horror creed though with small roles for actors like the legendary Tom Atkins (Halloween 3) and Jamie Kennedy (Scream) who are both wonderful, especially Tom Atkins as the grumpy and grizzled diner owner.
The rest of the cast is filled with lesser known actors but for the most part they do their jobs well, even if it’s hard to buy them as high school kids in the opening scenes. And I was nicely surprised to see how overall diverse the cast was as well, always a nice touch to see in the genre.
The makeup and gore effects are really well done in this movie, that old school practical effects work never goes out of style.
In the end this is a movie that I feel more people need to be aware of , and see, as it’s got some great plot twists, and cool kills that should make this movie a fine entry into the spooky season canon.
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