![]() ![]() But if there was one thing that was consistent, it was that most underperformed. Eleven movies would follow before the end of the year, some acclaimed ( Blue Velvet, Manhunter), some less so ( My Little Pony: The Movie and the wheelbarrow-full-of-coke Stephen King extravaganza Maximum Overdrive). In June, the company’s first feature debuted, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s shoot-’em-up and future gubernatorial campaign ad Raw Deal. ![]() Founded by the legendary movie producer Dino De Laurentiis, DEG went public that May, raising $240 million. The Wilmington, North Carolina-based De Laurentiis Entertainment Group scheduled its first slate of movies for the summer of 1986. “It’s been amazing.” In turn, the information he has collected tells the tale of an improbable movie that’s better than it’s usually remembered. “There’s no way in hell when I saw that move back in 1986 that I ever, EVER thought I’d be able to talk with the people that made the film,” he wrote. Now, every Halloween, Leicht tries to add another detail-rich piece to the web’s foremost Trick Or Treat shrine, filling out the movie’s history with the occasional retrospectives that surface elsewhere and the interviews he has conducted himself. Not any of the other problems in the world, but a style of music!” This was at the height of the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) and the whole ‘Satanic Panic’ where parents thought that heavy metal music was going to corrupt the Earth. “These days it comes off as a little campy, but in 1986, it ‘spoke’ to you…all the danger and a little evil of ‘The Devil’s Music’ that society considered metal music back in the day. “I was a teenage metalhead when the movie came out, and it totally spoke to all of us metalheads,” he remembered. Leicht, who also shreds it up in the horror-themed band Witching Hour, first caught Trick Or Treat during its original theatrical run. Not many movies can repeatedly take you back in time like that.” “I’m older now, but whenever I watch the film, I’m a teenager again. “I still get that feeling of spookiness, of the feeling and vibe of Halloween when I watch it,” Tony Leicht, the proprietor of Trick Or Treat fan site emailed to me. Outside of the people who made this movie and their mothers, there is a small but growing cult that adores this 98-minute, Fastway-scored romp centered on teenage metal fan Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer and Sammi Curr, the vindictive metaller that Weinbauer brings back to life by playing Curr’s final record backwards. Somehow, I am not alone in thinking this. Trick Or Treat is a sneaky-smart movie with an incredible backstory that understands the motivations of metalheads better than most. However, if I may, knowing full well that I’m probably going back to rehab after typing this, I would like to now propose a third way to think of this movie: Trick Or Treat is definitely both of those things. For instance, if you ever wanted to connect King Diamond to The Red Shoe Diaries in fewer than six degrees, this flick is your tollbooth. As a curious nexus between hundreds of cultural touchstones.As a cheeseball Nightmare On Elm Street horror comedy knockoff forever tethered to the era in which it was made.Before I re-watched Trick Or Treat for last year’s intro on Black Roses and heavy metal cinema, I thought about this 1986 movie in two ways: ![]()
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