Trick or Treats (1982)

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I watched this awful movie called Trick or Treats [sic] (1982). Got it on streaming video. A woman in her 30's gets a job babysitting a bratty kid on Halloween. He's a junior magician. He keeps playing practical jokes on her and she keeps falling for them. He pretends to be killed by a guillotine, to cut his finger off, to stab himself, drown in the swimming pool. Meanwhile, the kid's father has escaped from a mental hospital and coming to kill everyone.

Made by Gary Graver, a cinematographer who worked with Orson Welles and Roger Corman and directed porno films under a different name. His son plays the bratty kid. Reportedly filmed in three weeks working from 6 PM to Midnight each day in the home of one of the stars. Made for $55 thousand in 1982. It was reportedly a remake of the British film Fright starring Honor Blackman.

Which reminded me of The Naked Witch, made for an estimated $8,000 two decades earlier which is about $67,000 today. They, too, stole the basic plot from an earlier movie, but they used it simply as an excuse for a series of nude scenes, and it was only about forty minutes long if you don't count the documentary on the history of witchcraft and the travelogue of central Texas at the beginning. Trick or Treats dragged on for an hour and a half.

It ends with the kid killing his own father. They apparently didn't see this as problematic. They did it with the kid's trick guillotine, but it doesn't chop his head off. He just has blood coming out of his mouth.

It came across as an attempted comedy, but it didn't work as comedy or horror.

David Carradine and Paul Bartel have minor roles. The credits list Orson Welles as "magical consultant".

There's another David Carradine movie directed by Paul Bartel, Death Race 2000, which has been edited down to an hour for streaming video. This movie might be passable if they cut it down to twenty minutes.