At least one positive emerged from the heavy-metal hysteria of the ’80s: We got a pretty goofy movie satirizing the whole thing — albeit at featherweight — in Trick or Treat. Directed by actor Charles Martin Smith (1987’s The Untouchables), the schlocky Dino De Laurentiis production centers on the kind of misfit teen Smith became famous for playing in George Lucas’ American Graffiti. That 1973 film’s nerdy Toad may as well be this 1986 film’s Eddie.
But the part belongs to Marc Price, then still ripe in his second-banana role as Skippy on TV’s Family Ties. Eddie wouldn’t dare sit near Skippy on the bus, but both are outcasts all the same. Eddie’s attic room is practically wallpapered with posters of the hair-metal bands in which he finds escape from daily abuse by preppy bully Tim (Doug Savant, the token gay of TV’s Melrose Place), but outright worship is reserved for Satan-loving singer Sammi Curr (former Solid Gold dancer Tony Fields). Moments after writing Curr a gushing fan letter, which he signs “Ragman,” Eddie learns via the TV news that his idol has perished in a hotel fire. Bummed out, Eddie seeks solace in the local rock DJ (Kiss front man Gene Simmons, sans makeup), who gifts the boy with a valuable slab of vinyl: the only pressing of Curr’s Songs in the Key of Death.
Playing the record from “rock’s chosen warrior” backward, Eddie not only hears personal messages from Curr emanating through his stereo speakers — he summons him from the dead! With half his mug burned and blistered, but spiked mullet intact, the resurrected Curr looks like Two-Face for the Kerrang! set. At first he helps Eddie exact revenge through high-school high jinks, but quickly takes things too far; the best example gives us Trick or Treat’s most memorable scene: Tim’s girlfriend (Elise Richards, Valet Girls) being stripped, fondled and plateaued by green mist swirling from a Walkman playing Curr’s lost album on cassette. Is it live or is it Memorex? (The second most memorable bit is Savant’s near-tears line reading in the aftermath: “He put Genie in the hospital with his voodoo witchcraft! Or whatever the hell it is!” Trust me: You gotta be there.)
Bearing only a minimal connection to the title-tied holiday of Halloween, Trick or Treat aims for subversion by casting metal legend Ozzy Osbourne, a real-life target of the Parents Music Resource Center, as a man of the cloth preaching against the evils of rock ’n’ roll, yet the movie goes no further than that. All the time Smith and the script spent trying to turn Curr into the next Freddy Krueger (by way of Penelope Spheeris) should have been invested in making our supposed hero more than a petulant mouth-breather, coming up with more imaginative ways for Eddie and his crush (Lisa Orgolini, Born to Ride) to defeat Curr than the ol’ laundry hamper/flushed toilet combo, and writing a conclusion that wrapped up well before Trick enters a cycle of repetition — or, as the music industry calls it, heavy rotation. —Rod Lott