It's also a classic 1986 horror film, which I really like. Alternatively it's called Ragman or Death at 33 RPM, but its "main" title is Trick or Treat.
Now, younger readers might not recall this, and I only heard about it second hand because although I am a crusty old millennial I am not that crusty and old to remember this the first time round, but there was in the 1980s a conspiracy theory that the music industry was inserting Satanic messages into their records via subliminal encoding, and you could hear them if you played the record backwards. This wasn't just a few cranks saying this, but such theories penetrated the halls of the US Government as well. You know how into the 2000s and even the 2010s (i.e. until most people started buying music via streaming like good little consoomers as opposed to physical copies like sensible people) there were these stickers on album covers saying, "parental advisory, explicit lyrics" in black and white? That came about because of the general moral panic about how music those days which mentions sex and horror is corrupting our youth, atop all the backmasking and deals with Beelzebub! Think of the children! Because this moral panic had as its face one Tipper Gore, wife of Internet inventor and scourge of ManBearPig Al Gore, it became known as the Tipper Sticker. And now you know.
Trick or Treat takes this idea as its foundational idea. What if, despite all the conspiratarding from evangelicals and Concerned Parents, there was a record out there which was haunted, and if you played it backwards, it would summon something genuinely evil?
So. Enter out dauntless hero, Eddie Weinbauer, aka Ragman. Played by a Marc Price, he's a mulleted teenage headbanger. He likes heavy metal and lives in a godawful small town of boringness called Lakeridge. It's never explained exactly where it is but given that the film contained location shootings in Wilmington, North Carolina, I'm assuming that it also is in North Carolina. He likes rocking out to all the great 1980s bands like Anthrax and Motley Crue and Slayer and Iron Maiden but his ultimate hero is Sammy Curr. You see, Sammy Curr, hesher hero, was the only notable person to have ever come from the yawnful locale that is Lakeridge and was even an alumnus of the school that Eddie goes to. He also likes various other nerd pursuits including Dungeons & Dragons, and is kind of an outcast and is ignored or bullied by his classmates to various degrees. Apart from a girl called Leslie (played by a Lisa Orgolini) who secretly fancies him but wouldn't admit it because that would render her a target also. Ahhhh. Aren't teenagers lovely. Eddie also befriends the DJ at his friendly local heavy metal radio station, a gentlemen known only as Nuke, who is played by Gene Simmons. Yes. That one. The Kiss frontman who would attend the opening of a letter, Gene Simmons. Who breaks to Ragman the following two items of bad news:
- Sammy Curr has been banned from reappearing at his former school's Halloween party by moral majority types.
- Sammy Curr also died in a freak hotel fire just recently.
However all is not lost, for Sammy, before his death, entrusted to Nuke a one off test pressing of an album that he recorded to only be played in the event of his demise, named "Songs in the Key of Death." Nuke lends it to Ragman because he knows that our dauntless protagonist is Sammy's biggest fan. Eddie takes it home and plays it.
He then overhears his mother downstairs watching some talk show where a televangelist is debating a music industry person about backmasking and how yes, there are Satanic messages in music encoded backwards in them. Hilariously the televangelist is played by Ozzy Osborne. Yes. That one. He even keeps his Brummie accent for it. Ragman thinks, welp, what could possibly go wrong, and plays Songs in the Key of Death backwards.
Wouldn't you know it, there's a hidden message from Sammy from BEYOND THE GRAVE on the record, and by playing it backwards Eddie "Ragman" Weinbauer has inadvertently resurrected him from the dead. Sammy is out for blood on the small-minded moral majority types that he was surrounded by, and has the power not only to blast lightning bolts from his guitar but to turn into an analog audio signal and record himself to tapes or other audio formats, as well as electrocute people who hear him. He records himself to a very distinctive cassette tape and says to Eddie that unless Eddie manages to sneak the recording into the sound system at the forthcoming school dance, he, Sammy, will subject Eddie to a gruesome demise. Oh, and the sheer force of Sammy's awesome rockingness literally blows Eddie's speakers.
Needless to say, this does not go according to plan. The chief bully steals the tape with Sammy on it from Eddie in the toilet, chief bully's girlfriend listens to it in the back of the car while chief bully is trying to persuade her to let him have a go on her, and gets electrocuted through her headphones and her ears melted to the rest of her head. Eddie manages, with Leslie's help, to retrieve the tape, intending to destroy it now he knows what Sammy can do, but wouldn't you know it, this act of rebellion causes Sammy Curr to emerge from the PA and start massacring everyone by playing his lightning blasting guitar at them (which the audience think is an actual cover band and think is great until the electrocution starts), and then discloses that he's coming for Eddie as well, so now Eddie has to put the malevolent yet totally fuckin' awesome genie back in the bottle somehow.
Trick or Treat is a film that is way better than it has any right to be. This will be partly coloured by the fact that I was one of those teenage heshers at that age who liked nerd pursuits and music that unleashed the fuckin' FURY on your FACE. And not that watered down nu-metal shit either. But proper thrash, death, black, and power metal by bands who do shows in sticky-floored clubs where stage diving is mandatory. I still am, in fact, though I've also more recently been getting into synthwave as well. Thing is, listening to Anthrax and Slayer in 1986 was considered uncool the same way as listening to Iced Earth and Children of Bodom and Rhapsody and Demon Burger was in 2002. And High Wycombe is in fact as boring and shite as the fictional Lakefield, North Carolina is portrayed as. But the film also puts it into perspective. At the end of the day, you're only a teenager for a limited number of years, and then you can fuck off out of your shit hometown and try to make something of yourself. The acting is kind of wonky at times though, and everything about the film is aggressively 1980s. Big hair! Moral panics! Even the scene where Eddie's mother wonders what on earth is going on while she's doing a Jane Fonda workout video in eye-watering Lycra and legwarmers. Part of the reason it works, though, is that there's an honesty about it. You can tell that the writers and producers were themselves headbangers. They got Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne to appear on it, and were trying to get Blackie Lawless of WASP to play Sammy but he turned it down. The posters and LPS in Eddie's room and paraphernalia are all the sort of things that actual headbangers would and still do accumulate. However, I don't think any working class or lower middle class teenager in 1986 would have a stereo system as top drawer as Eddie's is. Come on. I've watched enough Techmoan to know that that's a Technics SL-1200 turntable, and that that is a pretty high end tape deck he records Sammy onto a tape with, and even that the tape is a TDK MA-R cassette which in and of itself was an expensive thing because it had a hefty metal shell and TDK's best tapestock of the time. It was the sort of tape that was intended for musicians to record demos on and for audiophiles. Not to mention his waist high speakers. Even I as an adult would balk at a separates based stacker stereo system, but then I have my Sharp VZ-2000 Brixton Briefcase, so I don't really need one. The soundtrack is also worthy of note; they got the band Fastway to record an original bang-the-head-that-doesn't-bang one for it.
I recommend this. Maybe less so if you aren't a headbanger but it's just plain fun in that sort of limited budget 1980s horror way. It may be technically and performatively rough around the edges, but it's a clear labour of love, and it has more heart to it than any current year over-CGI'd sludge. If you do like this sort of thing, I recommend Fright Night, Chopping Mall, and From Beyond as well.
(IN24/27)