In his book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor, Bruce Campbell says something along the lines that all actors and directors have roads leading back to b-movie fare. Actor/director Charles Martin Smith’s Trick or Treat is definitely no exception to this idea.

Smith, better known as Toad in American Graffiti, directed this film which screams of clichés on how people interpreted heavy metal in the Eighties. Marc Price, better known as Skippy on "Family Ties", stars as Eddie Weinbauer, a troubled teenager simultaneously dealing with the death of his favorite rock star (Sammi Curr, played by Tony Fields) and musclehead jocks at his school picking on him. With the guidance found in backwards messages embedded in Curr’s final recording, Eddie does what Curr says until things turn almost deadly. Trying to rid his life of the recording, Eddie tries to save his friends and even his rivals from the wrath of Sammi Curr.

If you live your life by stereotypes, then all heavy metal music is the work of Satan and everyone that listens to it is doomed to eternal damnation. I don’t know if Trick or Treat is playing along or against that stereotype, but the film definitely runs with the alleged demonic undertones. As someone who’s a fan of metal and has read plenty of metal band bios, the number of bands that actually live in the spooky imagery is small. With the PMRC flipping out about WASP and Twisted Sister around the same time that Trick or Treat was made, the subject seemed very timely. Now in 2006, this feels like an exploitation piece.

Two well-known metal musicians have small cameos here, but they are enough to make them be prominently displayed on the box. Gene Simmons is the radio DJ that gives Eddie the final Sammi Curr recording while Ozzy Osbourne plays a minister that objects to heavy metal. Yeah, they’re funny spots, but definitely not something to be proud of considering the fact that they’re in this film. What’s really interesting is that the soundtrack is performed by Fastway, featuring former Motörhead guitarist, "Fast" Eddie Clarke and Dave King, current singer/guitarist for folk-punk-jig powerhouse, Flogging Molly. You’re not going to find any resemblance between a song like Flogging Molly’s "Drunken Lullabies" and Fastway’s "Get Tough," but they have a connection.

Trick or Treat is the kind of film that is perfect for drunken ridicule with your friends in a bar. I was fortunate to see it in one and it made the film very fun to watch. If I were to see it on late-night by myself, I’d pass. Definitely have your friends around and leave everything you’ve known about movie-making dos and don’ts at the door.