which_chick | (no subject)

Movie review. Trick or Treat. Oh, did I enjoy this movie. Of course, I expected to enjoy it.

The people playing high school students look way too old to be playing high school students. This amuses me.

People in the eighties, showing their tits, may well have *real* tits that are small and perky and such. Novelty value, o'course.

It's got Ozzy playing an evangelical priest, which is hysterical. I was pretty impressed that they managed to cover up all his tattoos, but he is wearing a fully buttoned dress shirt, which helps.

The movie's from 1986, which was (iirc) right in the middle of the PMRC kerfluffle (Click the link, kidlets. Click the link.) and Tipper Gore going on about how you couldn't raise PG kids in an X-rated society. I believe she wrote a book with that title. Iirc, the story was that her daughter brought home a copy of Prince's album Purple Rain, which included the song Darling Nikki, a song so offensive and sin-inducing that even today, kids hum the lyrics. It's become a part of popular culture like nothing you've ever seen before... more popular than Where's the beef?, Rubik's Cube, and All Your Base put together. Yeah. (Hey, Tipper! Internet is for porn! How d'ya like them apples? Lookin' back, we can all see now that the eighties were so... so... so fucking innocent. There was no goatse then. Nobody spent hours on rotten.com clicking on what they oughten't click on. Now we have Boy meets train in the worst possible way and a gallery of gunshot wounds characterized by caliber. A little song about masturbating seems positively innocuous these days.) Anyway, the movie looks a little older than that in setting -- hairstyles and the fact that the vinyl LP hadn't died yet put it, for me, a couple of years earlier but not before the era of big-hair metal.

The bad guy, the bad dead guy, vamps more than you would think humanly possible. The vamping is extreme. I think it's supposed to make him look cool, but it makes him look drag queen. (Not, y'know, that drag queens are uncool, but I don't think it's the effect they had in mind.) The eyeliner doesn't help matters. He moves well for a dead guy, but the whole thing sort of falls apart when he starts shooting lightning bolts at people with his guitar at the Halloween Dance (TM). That was too much cock-metaphor for me and I started to laugh.

THE BOOM MIKE IS VISIBLE IN AT LEAST ONE SHOT!!! That's always a sign of kwalidy filmmaking. (Look when "Mom" and "Stan" are getting ready to leave and Mom asks if our hero Eddie is going to be okay.) At first I thought it was a large red penis coming in from the top of the frame but it turned out to be the boom mike instead. Pity, that.

The plot is sort of weird. Eddie, a loser metalhead boy (We do have a lot of establishing footage for both loser and metalhead tags. They're justified. The establishing footage for loser status is pretty damn painful to watch.) who has conversations with the last record and/or spirit of the possibly satanically possessed recently dead (died in a hotel fire) heavy metal rocker hero person (Sammy Curr) who, wonder of wonders, went to Eddie's high school before he was famous. Eddie is not particularly fast on the uptake with the talking record and it takes him rather a while to figure out that the spirit/record is kind of evil. The skulls, chains, black spikey leather bits, backward masking messages -- I mean, dang. You think that stuff would be a clue, but apparently it isn't for Eddie, who is too busy with the lifestyle to notice anything sinister. (Eddie's mother (a single mother, natch) clearly grasps her son's heavy metal homoerotic bondage lifestyle by flipping through his assorted bling and some disconcerting album covers. She is, however, unable to work the stereo when it starts talking to her. I really hate it when movies show women sucking at basic life skills technology like, y'know, operating a fucking stero. Movies never show women unable to operate a washing machine or a dishwasher. Now why is that, when these same technophobic women are completely baffled by a two-cassette deck with equalizers and a turntable?)

Eddie's chief tormentor at school is the blond prep Tim. Eddie and Tim clearly have the hots for each other but are in total denial. Guys! Pick fuck instead of fight. It's less painful in the long run. Also, fashion tip for a movie that *needs* fashion tips: Wearing an oh-so-eighties headband and metal bondage wristlets and such means you can't really say ciao at the same time because it totally clashes with the outfit. Like totally. Things should match.

Eddie and the girl (Leslie, I think) get out of the dance and made sure that all the copies of the record/tape were destroyed... except for the one that the DJ friend already made to play over the radio at midnight on Halloween. So they're off to the radio station. Eddie takes full responsibilty for having a tape provided by a sleazy late-night DJ (Gene Simmons) with clear issues... and goes off to sucker the dead rocker person into coming after him. He leaves the girl behind to kill the tape after he's lured the dead rocker person away. This noble plan, er, works. Yay.

The End.