- Directed by Michael Dougherty
- Written by Michael Dougherty
- Stars Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, Leslie Bibb
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 22 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoBx7F-q2CA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This is a clever anthology, taking place in the same town on the same Halloween night. We get to see things at different times and different points of view that bring it all together nicely. Individually the stories are just okay, but the whole thing together is very good. It’s creepy, has a good cast, and the special effects are really good. Overall very well done and entertaining.
Synopsis
We begin with a PSA discussing good advice for kids on Halloween.
Emma and Henry are two drunk adults in costumes. She wants to clean up all the decorations before her mother comes for a visit tomorrow. She notices a guy in a mask just standing there watching her. Something under a bedsheet kills her while Henry sits inside and watches porn waiting for her to join him for a fun time. Sometime later Henry notices Emma never came inside and goes out looking for her. He finds her. Credits roll.
Earlier that night, in Warren Valley, Ohio, there’s a huge celebration. Laurie and her friends are all dressed as fairy-tale girls. Laurie is Red Riding Hood, and she whines that she’s still a virgin.
Charlie grabs a handful of candy out of Stephen’s pumpkin and gets caught in the act. Stephen talks about the dead roaming free this one night of the year. Stephen is a bit of a traditionalist– “always check your candy,” he warns as Charlie pukes out his entire innards. Too late. We see that Stephen is the local school principal. Stephen carries overweight Charlie to the backyard and puts him in the pre-dug grave. Between kids, dogs, and neighbors, it’s really hard to dispose of a body.
As he goes back inside, one of the neighbors tries to get his attention, but he doesn’t care. His son wants to carve a pumpkin– right now. Except… it’s not a pumpkin.
A group of kids is out searching for jack-o-lanterns for a charity project. “Rhonda the Retard” comes out of one of the houses; she’s said to be some kind of idiot genius who joins them. Meanwhile, a vampire kills a woman at the big party downtown.
The five pumpkin kids end up in a rock quarry. This is where the Halloween School Bus Massacre happened thirty years ago. Flashback time: eight troubled, disturbed children were on this bus, but the driver took a different route today. The kids’ parents were sick of their crap and paid the bus driver to kill all their children. We see that the kids were chained into their seats. One of the kids commandeered the bus but drove it over the cliff instead. The driver was never heard from again, and neither were those kids.
Back in Town, Laurie’s looking for men, but can’t find any single ones. She spots the vampire from earlier.
The pumpkin collectors plan to leave eight pumpkins there as offerings to the kids who died. The group splits up, and Rhonda ends up alone; she encounters the schoolbus. She’s chased by monsters until she loses her glasses and falls on a rock; turns out the monsters were the rest of her friends playing a prank. Then the real dead kids show up… and Rhonda gets her revenge.
Throughout each of these stories so far, we get glimpses of a little kid with a cloth pumpkin mask wandering around. Since he’s the kid on the movie poster, it seems likely we’ll be seeing him again.
Laurie, aka Little Red Riding Hood, is now walking through the woods and runs into the masked vampire again. “What big eyes you have…” Back at the party, someone throws a body wearing the Red Riding Hood costume into the clearing. It’s not Laurie inside; it’s the vampire. Laurie shows up and says she was playing hard to get. The vampire was wearing false teeth; it’s Stephen from before, just in a costume. Turns out, Laurie isn’t _that kind _of virgin; she’s just never killed before. All the women at this party are werewolves. The little pumpkin boy just sits and watches all of this.
Earlier…
A group of kids approach a creepy old house for some trick or treating. Inside is a grouchy old man who scares them away and takes their candy. There’s one kid outside who comes back. We see that he’s Mr. Kreeg, Stephen’s angry neighbor from before. When he goes out the front door, he sees dozens of pumpkins out there. His dog won’t stop barking at the little doggy door.
Eventually, Kreeg sees someone upstairs inside the house. It’s the little pumpkin-kid we’ve been seeing around the neighborhood. He goes up to his bedroom and finds more than he bargained for. The little boy pulls out a candy bar and peels it, revealing a box-cutter blade inside. The little boy attacks, and the two fight. We get the scene from earlier as Kreeg yells for neighbor Stephen to help and is ignored.
Kreeg finally shoots the kid with his shotgun. There’s more pumpkin guts and slime than blood. He calls 911, but the phone goes dead when the cord is yanked. The child’s severed hand starts chasing him around the room. The hand reconnects, and the kid gets up. This is where Kreeg really figures out that something isn’t right with all this. The kid takes the piece of candy Kreeg was about to eat and just leaves Kreeg alive on the floor. We see that Kreeg is the former bus driver from one of the other segments.
Later, more trick-or-treaters come to the door, and Kreeg gives them each a big handful of candy. We see more characters from previous segments interacting. Kreeg watches Rhonda cross the street after her ordeal, he watches the girl in the car heading to the party, and Emma and Henry arguing about taking the decorations down. The doorbell rings, and it’s all the dead kids from the school bus coming to pay Keeg a visit…
Commentary
It’s great the way the various stories overlap and eventually all tie together. None of the segments are especially noteworthy individually, but they do really fit together exceptionally well. There are lots of recognizable faces here in each segment, and none of the parts are bad.
It’s really good.