Baby Diaper

Not even going to bury the lead on this one, The Terror of Hallow's Eve was powerfully disappointing. It had so much potential and it all fell apart in the end.  It's like when your kid plays soccer and during practice, he's fast and scores a couple goals but when the game comes around, he keeps getting off sides and gets hit in the face when he tries to attempt a header.  You know the potential is there but he just keeps blowing it, he or she, whichever is worse.  Anyway, it's not clear if there were production difficulties or the budget ran out but the end result is similar to three different movies frankensteined together to make a thing. 

The main reason this is so disappointing is because the movie starts pretty solid.  Cinematically it pulls you in to the story of a kid who is suspiciously good at making monsters and practical effects but misses his father and is bullied.  We also get a cameo from Eric Roberts shortly after the movie's first scare.   Everything is set in the realistic world of 1981, which includes latchkey kids, milk cartons and bullies using homophobic slurs they can't say today.  The protagonist is named Tim but his mother whom he lives with calls him "Timmy". He then gets beat up by the bullies for accidentally scratching the main bully's car.  The beating does have a silver lining though because after that , he is no longer referred to as "Timmy".  The kid is like 15 and in high school, let's grow the hell up. 

Tim goes home and hears a strange noise coming from the attic.  Even after getting beat up and bloodied, he thinks it's a good idea to go check out this strange noise in his dark empty house, unarmed.  He finds a book among some old photographs of daddy and somehow brings The Trickster to life.  The Trickster is the "mascot" of this movie and is nowhere near as cute as the Summerween Trickster from Gravity Falls.  However, the Trickster is the main reason I chose this movie for tonight.  I first saw him walking around Midsummer Scream last year and the design of this character is genius.  His face alone brings to mind Freud's theory of the Uncanny (educate yourself and read about it here, I'll wait.) When I saw him walking around the convention last year, something about his face was very familiar and disturbing a mixture between Otis from House of a Thousand Corpses and a Margaret Keane painting.  He had a blank stare that was very uneasy but in this film his lips move when he talks which detracts a little from the effect.  The Trickster could have been used in sequels and become one of the great horror figures instead of wasted potential.    

The second act is where this movie falls flat because like other horror films I have reviewed here, the intrinsic reality established in the beginning of the film is thrown away and the movie inexplicably turns surreal.  Tim leads the bullies to his house and somehow, he or the trickster knows their fears and when they step into different rooms, the room turns into a completely different scenario.  Bedrooms turn into swamps or some sort of puppet carnival theater where the bullies are killed by strange creatures.  In these scenes, there are references to The Lost Boys, Dolls, Puppet Master, Halloween, Tales from The Darkside and Arachnophobia which are fun to spot but we still are not sure why the house doors lead to other places like in Monsters Inc.  We then see the Trickster turn into some kind of Alien looking creature for some reason and somehow locks the doors from the inside in such a way where the characters can't unlock them.  After that, Tim's dad comes back but then disintegrates before Tim's mom returns from work and she somehow dies too.  

The next scenes take place in the present during All Hallow's Eve at Haddonfield Hospital (get it?) where Tim is now older and we find out that he was charged with the murdered of everyone at the house back in 1981.  He still insists he did not commit the murders but he is in a place with a lot of dangerous insane people, possibly with the last name of Myers so no one believes him.  There is a new nurse who takes his file and receives a phone call from a frantic girl saying that there are dead people around her and that she will be blamed for the murders even though she did not kill anyone, it was... as the nurse sees the drawing... The Trickster.  That's it, that's the story.  It makes me sad because everything other than the plot in this movie was good.  The creature effects and props were great, acting, cinematography and editing were good but they can't hold up a rickety storyline.  Whatever the point of this movie was, I missed it and based on other reviews, it is a common critique.  Out of sheer disillusionment and wasted potential I have to say this is the worst movie from this year's picks so far,  I have spoken.