cult film freak: OZZY OSBOURNE CRASHES 'TRICK OR TREAT' STARRING MARC PRICE

Title: TRICK OR TREAT Year: 1986 Rating: ** 1/2

Heavy Metal was invented outright by Black Sabbath, a band named after a horror film, and the two are inseparable, since metal is to music what horror is to cinema... so it's a kind of double-whammy irony that Ozzy Osbourne would play a preacher preaching against devil-culture back-masked music in the 1980's horror-exploitation TRICK OR TRICK...

Which is really yet another bully sub-genre entry, going all the way back to REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE and more recent, THE KARATE KID... the picked-on boy just happens to be partnered with the most gorgeous girl in school, making Lisa Orgolini another Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Shue, and one of the film's many problems...

Lisa Orgolini and Marc Price in TRICK OR TREAT

How can you feel sorry for underdog Marc Price when he's immediately synced up with a magazine model? The fan-favorite FAMILY TIES geek plays a metal-fanatic high-schooler obsessed with a dead rock star, haunted by his phantom providing back-masking instructions to kill his/their enemies...

Ozzy's cameo is quickly viewed on television, preaching against himself, basically, as the fictional Sammi Curr (played by Solid Gold dancer Tony Fields) is more or less Osbourne, whose actual image appears in the introduction of Price's favorite metal bands/artists...

Gene Simmons in TRICK OR TREAT

And like AMERICAN GRAFFITI that starred this feature's director Charles Martin Smith, the youngster's in cahoots with an affable disc-jockey, providing Gene Simmons a genuine acting role (like Michael Crichton's RUNAWAY) instead of a tongue-in-cheek/blink-or-miss cameo...

With an ingrown soundtrack by the rock/metal hybrid FASTWAY as if they were the avenging singer, TRICK OR TRICK doesn't do justice to the kind of body-count slasher movies it's celebrating, or the maligned heavy metal youth culture — who finally had the chance to effectively blend both their favorite genre of music and movies together.