The much delayed Trick ‘R Treat is a testament to the lasting influence of 80s horror cinema, its acceptance by the “fans” testifying to their regressive cinematic taste . Rookie director Michael Dougherty’s throwback to classic anthology films like Creepshow coasts on cliches and a half-assed Tarantinoid structure, failing to engage on any level. His kitchen sink approach results in an ugly melange of genre tropes without any clear form, message, or worldview outside of its own maddeningly self-referential universe.

First of all, the decision to intercut the stories was a terrible one. The illusion of simultaneous activity is created, then destroyed with “clever” chronological overlaps. Just when you’re getting involved in watching Dylan Baker murder the kid from Bad Santa with a tainted Hershey bar, we abruptly cut to Anna Paquin trying on Halloween costumes with her crew of buxom Barbie doll girlfriends. Then we throw in another storyline about a bunch of kids gathering jack o’ lanterns for a strange ritual that turns, ever so predictably, into the usual Prank Gone Horribly Wrong. Tying these strands together is a creepy kid running around wearing a gunny sack, who may or may not represent the Spirit of Halloween. Whatever happened to the Great Pumpkin?

Unlike any of the 80s genre classics the film tries to emulate, there aren’t any good kills, the special effects are surprisingly bad, and there isn’t a single scary moment that doesn’t involve cranked up sound effects and editing straight out of Suspense Building 101. Anna Paquin’s “Red Riding Hood” storyline is unbelievable to the point of surrealism; in particular the “poor lonely girl” montage, where she looks mournfully at all the other happy couples hooking up around her, is a masterpiece of unintentional comic brilliance. That’s about as deep as Dougherty’s willing to get with his characters. In a few minutes we’ve become witness to some nonsensical plot resolution involving werewolves, more foolishness with quasi-vampires, and a plot twist that is jaw dropping in its pointlessness (not to mention the sheer fucking havoc it wreaks on the already tenuous chronology).

What stood out in the fecal stew was the individual moments of mastery, like the shot of the bus going into the gorge, or the protracted scene where Dylan Baker stomps on a not-quite-dead body so as not to draw the ire of irate neighbor Brian Cox. Most of the film feels like filler, even though it’s already been chopped down to the bone. There is only the barest of connective tissue between self-contained stories, most of the time we leap around between stories and timelines more or less at will. Whoever edited this film must have been drunk the entire time he was at work. None of this shit fits together at all. Sometimes you’ll get an occasional Tarantinoid Timeline Overlap, where characters from different stories bump into each other at different times. Dougherty, despite his painfully obvious pretensions, doesn’t have what it takes in the storytelling department. So he goes for the usual horror sensationalism, with excessive gore and a loud-ass sound mix. Once he abandons his lofty aspirations and narrows his scope a bit, the film actually comes together for a satisfying final 10 minutes.

Even though it amounts to little more than 10 minutes of Brian Cox getting stabbed with pieces of candy, it somehow uses the gunny sack kid to tie everything up in a nice grisly bow. Even in a piece of crap like this, Cox still gives a mesmerizing performance, in spite of having to do things like deliver a groan inducing reference to Carpenter’s The Thing, while an Evil Dead 2 reference occurs concurrently before him. You may also notice that the child resembles a juvenile Pumpkinhead. Sharp eyed viewers will discover that yes, he does in fact have a pumpkin for a head. That’s why we carve jack o’ lanterns and give out candy, or else this freak will visit you in the night and vivisect you with a razor sharp Tootsie Roll. This segment felt like some long forgotten episode of “Tales from the Crypt”. Not necessarily a good one, mind you. Too little, too late; the film is so much less than the sum of its parts, with a tacky, cheap sounding musical score continually enhancing its schlocky, just-for-kids brand of horror.

Trick ‘R Treat fails at just about everything it sets out to do, most of all its comic book ambiance. Whereas Creepshow nailed that atmosphere with perfection, we get little of that EC Comics feel outside of halfhearted cartoon credits, and two title cards that say “EARLIER…” and “LATER…” It’s easy to see why this film was shelved for so long. Its 77 minutes felt like three times that length, and I’m sure the plentiful child deaths contributed as well. The modern horror market is so depressing, filled with ripoffs, sequels and “homages” to already shoddy material, that something with even the dullest gleam of originality can arrive late, to the rental market, on the crest of a ridiculous tidal wave of hyperbole, destined to “stand with the greats” and all that rubbish. If not for a friend’s very enthusiastic recommendation, I would not have even sat through the entirety of the film; suffice to say that friend is On Notice.

Rent Creepshow if you must watch a horror anthology. Or, if you’re craving something artier, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan fits the bill, provided you have 3 hours to spare.

**SPOILER WARNING**

Johannesburg has been besieged by a giant hovering metaphor, which deposits a vast population of ‘aliens’ in a shantytown ruled by African gangsters. It’s up to an annoying pencil pusher with a silly accent to exterminate them for a fascist mega-corporation. District 9 wins a point for its clever use of CGI, creating the illusion of a much grander scope than its paltry budget would allow. Also, the cinematography vastly diminishes the image quality, allowing for less detail intensive modeling. The first act is a very badly done fake documentary, appearing to be something produced for South African Community Television; here, the crappy image works to the advantage of the film, provided it is viewed as a strange parody of apartheid, just as Alien Nation satirized mass Mexican immigration.

Rookie director Neill Blumkamp is too clever by half; the interviewed “alien experts” often must explain things that would be self-evident in their own universe, and there are several lame attempts at foreshadowing the terrible fate of its protagonist. Intriguing details, such as the prawn junkies who become strung out on canned cat food, are brought up and then never pay off; it’s all smoke and mirrors. The first 30 minutes are purely expository, setting up the human task force, led by a Jesse Ventura clone, who will ultimately become the one-dimensional source of villainy. The rest is bullshit that comes across like an imitation of the Media Breaks in Starship Troopers and the magnificent Robocop, both infinitely better offerings for the science fiction fan.

While the attempts at hard sci-fi are sometimes compelling, it doesn’t take very long until one realizes the trickery is there to distract us from the inherent lack of a plot. Nothing of interest happens until Wikus van der Merwe, the pencil pusher, encounters a plot device that inexplicably turns him into an alien. Somehow, this mysterious alien race is able to make fuel for their ship that turns humans into one of their own upon contact. By this logic, if a prawn were to come into contact with, say, gasoline, he would slowly but surely turn into a human. Maybe District 10 will deal with this subject. Lord knows District 9 has made a trainload of cash. Part of me’s happy for Peter Jackson and his glorious Wingnut Films, but another part’s mystified as to why everyone likes this increasingly ridiculous, onanistic CGI showcase. Even the great Walter Chaw was seduced by the skillful special effects, wrote a superlative review, and will doubtless place this halfhearted effort on his Top 10 list. To be fair, it’s been an underwhelming year at the movies, but raising District 9 to classic status is a premature action at best. Especially in light of just how bad the movie becomes after a certain point.

The third act undoes all the promise of the plotless first act, ditches the faux-doc format and turns into a braindead, formulaic buddy action flick, with the only bits of originality being Wikus’ utter heartlessness and cowardice in the face of the thinly developed Bad Guys. But he comes back to use his wicked new prawn tentacle to wreak havoc, in an unexplained, unearned shift of character. Even more insulting is the simplistic conflict, using an all-purpose evil conglomerate to represent all of humanity, which leaves the oppressed “prawns” as the only sympathetic characters by default. But, since the aliens are unable to use their own weaponry, Wikus is inexplicably left to free the prawns from the icy grasp of apartheid. And he does so during an action sequence that features  a robotic deus ex machina giving Wikus incredible powers, which cause the baddies to explode juicily while they empty machine guns into his metal carapace with no visible effect. And the damn thing is boring. As William Hurt once said, “How do you fuck that up!?”

Not like the painfully uncomplicated carnage would faze the Halo fans in the audience who are most assuredly jacked up on Mountain Dew. Cool alien gun make bad humans go BOOM! Whee!!!!

There could be so much more to this universe. How come the humans didn’t turn the floating ship into a military outpost or a tourist attraction? How come the world’s brightest minds were unable to reverse-engineer the aliens’ advanced weaponry? How come Wikus is able to maneuver an alien battle-mech, with digitized readouts all in Prawnese, after only 70 odd hours as a humalien? How come, for a movie that tries so damn hard to be against racism, the only black characters are evil drug lords, voodoo cultists, or bureaucratic puppets who end up in prison? How come, for a movie with such ambitious scope, does 75% of the action take place in a generic shantytown set? How come this Blumkamp fellow, whose only prior experience was directing video game cut scenes, gets to be called a “visionary” while much more capable directors continue to slave away unnoticed in non-genre fields?

District 9 is a shoo-in for Overhyped Film of the Year. Its novelty wears out before the second act is even through, and by the time the dickish “hero” begins his cathartic rampage, you’ll either be offended or asleep. It is just another paean to the power of the white man, dressed up with a much more elaborate disguise than usual. In the end, the sci-fi is so soft you could spread it on a Ritz cracker to wash down with some White Zinfandel.

Elite Squad wants to be City of God so badly, it’s a bit painful to watch. Jose Padilha shows little confidence when it comes to staging action or providing character development that he rips off that earlier, better Brazilian crime epic time and time again. This time it’s the usual drug wars from the cops’ point of view. The titular Squad is the amusingly named BOPE, a paramilitary division of the police force designed to operate in the treacherous environment of the favelas. Gunning down uzi-toting teenagers and roughing up low-level pot dealers grow tiresome quickly, so we halt the story’s progression to delve into tangental back stories. All the while, the kalaiedoscopic, frenetic editing combined with omnipresent voiceover, unneccessary freeze-frames, slang-filled dialogue, and casual violence consistently remind us of City of God, and, more to the point, how its style was unique before Tony Scott and others began to cannibalize it.

BOPE is led by Captain Nascimento, a repulsive power-tripping fascist tool with serious rage issues who is, annoyingly enough, our narrator. His fatalistic point of view is intriguing, for the first two minutes, before his obsession with rules and consequences becomes grating. Prolonged anti-drug messages verge on becoming didactic; one story involves Matias,  a young BOPE officer who must juggle a stressful job, a burgeoning relationship, and an oral presentation on Foucalt for Philosophy 101.  It would have been amusing if the group’d tackled something from his sexual studies, but no, we use the oh-so-controversial topic of police corruption to shoehorn in Important Social Commentary. Thrill as the group discusses judicial reform! Cling to the edge of your seat when Matias’ recently-met-cute girlfriend parries his right-wing ideology attack with nary a glance at her open Derrida text! When his study buddies bust out joints and proceed to pass around a lit roach, he politely refuses. “Matias should have arrested them, according to the law,” our narrator interjects in a hamhanded, propagandistic Reefer Madness style. “He was already getting soft.”

When psuedo-propaganda and makeout sessions set to REM’s “Shiny Happy People” fail to impress, we head on to scenes of strange black humor, such as criminals being enlisted to help dispose of corpses (so the cops can avoid paperwork) or a corrupt senior officer scamming gunrunners out of their latest shipment. When that doesn’t quite gel, we move on to extended boot camp sequences complete with name calling, excessive violence, and a graveyard where cowardly trainees bury their uniforms as part of their discharge procedure. Sure, we all like the first half of Full Metal Jacket, but none of the skills learned ever pay off. Surely there must have been a better way to show team solidarity than to have them consume a compatriot’s vomit, on orders from our sociopathic hero. At least 50% of Elite Squad consists of Nascimento being a complete asshole to everyone he sees. There are a couple of action sequences that are handled with considerable incompetence.

Nothing ever comes together in a satisfying way. After a trigger-happy BOPE Fiend is turned into swiss cheese by a random street gang, the final act turns into a simplistic, Bronson-esque revenge fantasy as our humble narrator dumps his prescribed MAOIs down the drain and proceeds to work his way up the chain of command, the usual 80s action style. It’s a very poor substitute for a plotline. Top it all off with Paul Greengrass Seizure-Cam to ensure no one vicariously enjoys the violence, or is even able to comprehend what is unfolding so loudly on screen. Elite Squad would not have made it through Basic, much less worked its way up to Elite status. It’s like watching someone trying to juggle 12 eggs at one time. They’ll catch a couple of them and the rest end up as an unholy mess. Padilha has shown great promise as a documentarian with his Bus 174, but in narrative form he’s a biter of the highest order.