HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 75
Six Decades: 2nd of 2 films from the 00's

...and the last movie in my Hooptober 8 list! Yay!

Oh yeah, this was the PERFECT movie to finish my HoopTober challenge with (I held it back on purpose because I thought it might be). Is there any more deliciously Halloween-soaked pumpkin-spiced bit of horror movie confection out there than Trick 'r Treat? This has been on my watchlist ever since I first heard of it (only about 5 years ago, this totally passed me by on release somehow) and it certainly didn't disappoint.

This is the filmic version of a Halloween themed amusement park. It's decked out with sumptuous holiday-themed production design and lurid over-the-top characterisations. We have vampires, werewolves, zombies, some kind of weird jack-o-lantern monster... even the creepy child-predator serial killer feels cartoonish.

An innovative reimagining of how horror anthologies can even be structured - it's hard to tell what's really the "wraparound" story and what's a segment - makes this constantly invigorating to watch. We get a multitude of totally unpredictable "stings in the tail" for these stories as well.

This is incredibly good fun. One October day I am going to line up a triple feature of this, The Mortuary Collection and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - they could all exist in the same horror-anthology-verse. Love this sort of stuff.

Hope everyone has had a Happy HoopTober! Now I just have my Halloween horror marathon and then back to only watching horror every third or fourth movie, as is my usual mode - LOL.