Trick or Treat

Eddie Weinbauer sports a mop of jet-black hair, wears a jean jacket covered in band pins, and walks with his shoulders up around his ears. That’s how a kid stands when he has figured out that the safest way to be in a room is to take up less of it. Marc Price, who was Skippy on Family Ties, has a gift for playing these sorts of awkward teens. If you went to high school in the 1980s you knew this boy. You may have eaten lunch at his table, or made a point of sitting somewhere else.

Eddie’s hero is Sammi Curr, a heavy metal star who graduated from Eddie’s own school and has been forbidden by the town fathers to come back and play the gym. Then Sammi dies in a hotel fire and Eddie is devastated. A local disc jockey, played by Gene Simmons of Kiss, gives Eddie the only pressing of Sammi’s last album. Eddie takes the record home and does what every parent in 1986 feared their child was doing in their bedroom. He plays it backward.

This was the height of the great Satanic Panic of the ’80s. The year before, the Senate held hearings on rock lyrics, and plenty of grown-ups believed that records hid messages from Beelzebub in their grooves. The movie takes that panic at its absurd word. The record really does talk to Eddie, telling him how to get even with the bullies, and for a while his revenge is a lot of fun to watch, because they have it coming. The Wilmington, N.C., locations place the film in the kind of small town that would have watched those hearings nodding along.

Tony Fields plays Sammi as a man of 38 and looks every year of it. Fields commits to the part, and the film is frank about the mascara-and-leather androgyny of ’80s metal, which most movies of the era preferred to snicker at, but which would have alarmed the Moral Majority even more than the Satanic messages. Part of me wondered whether a younger rock god would have been more engaging, but making the character older allows Eddie to view him as a father figure. In true Spielberg style, Eddie’s dad is nowhere in sight.

Ozzy Osbourne turns up as a preacher on television warning parents about the evils of heavy metal. His deadpan delivery is the film’s highlight. Simmons is good too, exuding a calm, sly authority that made me wish he had more screen time.

Some touches are clumsy. Lisa Orgolini plays a popular girl who takes an interest in Eddie for reasons the screenplay keeps to itself. After learning of Sammi’s death, Eddie rips the posters off his walls while the soundtrack plays a song about tearing them down, in case we missed it. But these are blemishes, not blunders. Through its first two acts, the film plays like one of the better Stephen King adaptations.

Then, at Sammi’s urging, Eddie gives one of the bullies a cassette recording of the album as a peace offering. The bully drives his girlfriend to a dark spot in the woods and steps out to relieve himself, and she puts on the Walkman, apparently expecting him to be gone for a whole side. We get some nudity the movie didn’t need, a demon, and headphones that melt into her ears in a nice gooey effect. The scheme only works if she listens and he doesn’t, and nobody seems to have noticed, Sammi included.

From here, the film nosedives. It had hinted at something bigger: a death that looked planned, and a record that seemed meant for Eddie all along. Instead, Sammi climbs out of the speakers as a comic-book supervillain who rides electrical current and disintegrates teenagers at a Halloween dance with animated lightning. Electro with a mullet. In the finale, Eddie, who nearly drowned at a pool party earlier, drives a car off a pier on purpose and escapes without any trouble.

For an hour the movie mixes teen misery, black comedy and horror about as well as Fright Night did, and that makes the ending more disappointing than an ending to a worse movie would be. People who love ’80s horror will find enough here to make it worth a rental. So will anyone who once covered a jacket in pins and waited for a record to tell them something. They should know that the car going off the pier is a pretty good metaphor for how the movie ends.