Told by way of a cycle of interconnected stories, this works well as a portmanteau of crimes and misdemeanours affecting a small town as it celebrates (or not!) Halloween. We start with a young couple returning from a party; the lady less enamoured with the occasion than her boyfriend. Suffice to say that there was no nookie for them that night (or ever again) as the series moves through a virgin, a group of glamorous vampires, a school principal with a penchant for the macabre and poor old Brian Cox's "Kreeg" who certainly has the most entertaining encounter with our tiny, pumpkin-headed, menace. The stories play well to our own fears and apprehensions, but there is also a soupçon of humour and a bit of a moral to it - suggesting, very strongly, that nay-sayers and folks who don't have treats are, quite literally, taking their lives in their own hands. There is no great reliance on visual effects. The presentation of the stories is characterful and genuinely scary a times without us looking for strings or CGI - and that makes this a more genuinely scary film that brings together many things evil and malevolent from the spiritual and fantasy worlds and couples them with some good old human vanity and nastiness. There is a sensible paucity of script - though some of Mr. Cox's one liners are potent, and Michael Dougherty allows the dark and eerie scenarios to evolve and facilitate the story with as few gimmicks as possible. Great fun, this.
