Planning on having a Halloween themed night at your home full of scary movies and wicked treats? Most of these nights probably have a movie list comprising of Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteeth. How about refreshing that list and including something new, and something that is actually about Halloween.

Before anyone cries foul over my statement that TRICK ‘R TREAT is the single best Halloween-themed movie ever made, allow me to back up the statement. While 1978′s Halloween is a masterful, amazing thriller that truly has no equal in the horror genre, TRICK ‘R TREAT is something wonderfully different. It’s a movie that is Halloween.

Whereas Carpenter’s classic is set during the holiday and it plays heavily into the plot, the film could arguably be set on any other night and be just as frightening. TRICK ‘R TREAT hinges completely on All Hallow’s Eve, taking every spooky childhood memory its viewers have about the holiday and mashing them into a gleeful, creepy anthology of tales that are somehow both genuinely chilling and nostalgically beautiful.

Writer and director Michael Dougherty has crafted a film that transformed me into a five-year-old child in a Dracula cape and plastic fangs, riveted in stunned horror as his vision played out before me. Somehow, it succeeds in being both terrifying and charming.

TRICK ‘R TREAT‘s story unfolds unlike a traditional anthology picture, with all of the movie’s separate plots taking place together. We’re not subjected to title cards or stunted intermissions between tales, but a seamless mix of Halloween hijinx and horrors. In its five overlapping stories, a couple discovers what happens when they blow out a jack o’ lantern before midnight, a bullying child learns to check his candy before eating it, a young woman is stalked by a hooded stranger at a harvest festival, a group of pranksters uncover the ghoulish truth about a local urban legend, and an elderly Scrooge is visited by a pint-sized hellion who is far more interested in tricks than treats.

TRICK ‘R TREAT definitely deserves to be part of your Halloween movie night!

The second Halloween film by Rob Zombie is set to release in theatres August 28th. If this is anything like the first film, it should never have been made. Assuming Rob Zombie hasn’t changed drastically, the only thing this movie will have is vulgarity, nudity, violence and profanity.

He absolutely butchered a classic film and I’m sure Moustapha is rolling in his grave. There isn’t one character in the film that doesn’t make a sexual reference or swear. I don’t know about you, but who wants to sit through two hours of such sad disgusting characters?

The original film was a simple, straight-ahead suspense film had little blood and intense suspense driven partly by the fact that the Michael Myers wasn’t jumping out of the shadows in every scene. What made the original so scary was the fact that Myers often did not appear at times when the audience was sure he would jump out. In Zombie’s version, Myers popped out at every turn, and always in the same way, the victim in front, crawling or running away, with him behind ready for an attack. It was boring and predictable.

To be honest, I’m not expecting much more of the new film. Sure the trailers are enticing; but, they were the first time around and that wasn’t anything more than a huge waste of time and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Take my advice; don’t waste your money on seeing this in theatres.

Here’s a synopsis of the new film pulled from IMDB:

“Picking up right where the first film left off, Laurie is taken to the hospital after supposedly killing the man who was responsible for the deaths of several people in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois.

However, her stay at Haddonfield General becomes very brief when a very much alive Michael appears once more, brutally murdering everyone in the hospital to find his sister. Michael disappears, and Laurie survives the infamous Halloween massacre, but is still haunted by it years later.

Laurie struggles to come to terms with her dark past, or at least forget it. But the supposedly dead Michael Myers has other plans, and as the anniversary of his massacre approaches, he returns to Haddonfield once more, with a family reunion planned that Laurie will never forget.”