If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if someone tried to turn the Holiday Killer trope into a multiyear LinkedIn career, Trick (2019) is your answer: a Halloween slasher that keeps coming back year after year, even though absolutely no one asked it to.
Directed by Patrick Lussier and co-written by Todd Farmer, Trick clearly wants to be the next iconic seasonal slasher—your new Halloween, Scream, or at least “that movie people ironically rewatch every October.” Instead, it feels like a 100-minute montage of, “Wait… what?” stapled together with fake blood and copious flashbacks.
The Legend of Trick: Now With 70% More Nonsense
The film’s big bad is Patrick “Trick” Weaver, a high school senior in 2015 who goes from awkward spin-the-bottle moment to full-blown massacre faster than you can say “toxic masculinity.” The knife lands on a boy, the other kids tease him, and Trick responds the way only a deeply unstable slasher script could justify: by stabbing five people to death in seconds.
From there, the movie wastes no time in disabling your brain’s logic circuits:
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Trick gets skewered with a fire poker.
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Trick gets taken to a hospital.
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Trick flips his own hospital bed—like a WWE wrestler on morphine—and slaughters staff with surgical tools.
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Trick gets shot multiple times by Detective Mike Denver and Sheriff Lisa Jayne.
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Trick, full of bullets and blood, then falls out a window, hits the road, and disappears into a river like a discount Michael Myers with Aquaman’s plot armor.
At this point, you might think, “Okay, so he’s supernatural.” The movie’s like: lol, maybe… maybe not… maybe cult? And that’s kind of the problem with Trick: it wants to have it all ways at once, but never earns any of them.
The Franchise That Isn’t: Trick, Year After Pointlessness
Instead of focusing on one night of terror, the movie jumps ahead year by year like we’re speed-running through a box-set of sequels:
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2016 – Trick shows up at a high school Halloween dance in Riverton and kills more people.
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2017 – More bodies at a party in Hudson Village.
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2018 – He murders federal agents in a bar in Shady Creek, because apparently no one in law enforcement has heard of bulletproof glass, backup, or “not sitting with your back to the door during a serial killer manhunt.”
By the time we hit 2019, Trick is basically the world’s most punctual seasonal employee. He pops up on schedule every October like a Spirit Halloween store, except somehow less well organized.
Instead of building tension, these time jumps just make everyone look wildly incompetent. Trick leaves trails of bodies across multiple towns along the same river for years, and the best anyone can come up with is, “He sure loves Halloween, huh?” You’d think by the third annual stabbing festival, someone would cancel the school dance.
Detective Mike Denver: Man, Myth, Mildly Confused
Omar Epps plays Det. Mike Denver, the obsessive cop chasing Trick across time and zip codes. This should be a cool, brooding role—a broken man haunted by a phantom killer. Instead, Denver spends much of the movie squinting at crime scenes like he’s waiting for a better script to arrive.
He gets:
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Shot at
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Stabbed
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Gaslit by teenagers
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Fired from his job
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Taunted with his name written in blood like a middle-schooler’s edgy notebook doodle
He’s clearly meant to be the Dr. Loomis to Trick’s Michael Myers, but without Loomis’s manic conviction or coherent arc. Denver repeatedly claims “It’s the same guy” while the movie keeps screaming, “SURPRISE! MAYBE IT’S A CULT! MAYBE IT’S SYMBOLIC! MAYBE WE’RE MAKING THIS UP AS WE GO!”
By the final act, you don’t feel like he’s hunting Trick; you feel like he’s trapped in a particularly violent HR case that won’t close.
Cheryl and the Teen Trauma Brigade
Kristina Reyes plays Cheryl, a survivor of the original 2015 massacre, who naturally has to deal with:
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Dead father (thanks, Trick)
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Constant re-emergence of the guy who tried to kill her
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Law enforcement that treats her like a walking clue vending machine
Cheryl actually gets one of the more satisfying moments when she uses her self-defense training to turn Trick’s knife against him. Unfortunately, the film then can’t resist undercutting its own catharsis with one last “But wait, it’s bigger than him!” twist, because heaven forbid a slasher villain’s arc actually end.
Trick or… Thirty People in the Same Makeup?
Eventually, the movie reveals its big “twist”: Trick isn’t just one guy. A whole group of devotees wearing the same face paint and masks have been carrying on his legacy. It’s like a violent Halloween version of an MLM.
We get:
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Multiple people in Trick makeup surrounding Denver
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Patrick himself rolling up in a wheelchair, like a boss doing a surprise site visit
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Everyone joining in on a group stabbing session like this is a teambuilding exercise
It’s meant to be chilling—“anyone can be Trick!”—but by this point, the film has thrown so many knives, masks, and fake-outs at you that it lands closer to “improv troupe with homicide issues.”
Then there’s the “real” Patrick, revealed with—of course—a scar on his stomach like a loyalty badge. Cheryl confronts him, they struggle, and she kills him. He whispers “one of us” like it’s supposed to be haunting instead of “we saw The Strangers and wanted a line like that.”
But wait! There’s more.
The Ending That Refuses to Die
You’d think Patrick’s death would finally wrap this mess up, but no. The film squeezes in one last gotcha: the devotees are still out there, traveling to recruit more followers, like a traveling murder pyramid scheme.
Then we learn Det. Denver was “stabbed to death” but—plot twist—he’s actually wearing Trick face paint too, and Deputy Slater turns out to be a devotee who attacks Sheriff Jayne. Cheryl and Jayne team up to stab him, then join Denver in a kind of Scooby-Doo “we’ll keep tracking them” epilogue squad.
So the ending is:
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Trick is dead
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But also everywhere
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And law enforcement is now basically a vigilante cult-hunter branch, armed mainly with knives and unresolved trauma
It feels less like a conclusion, and more like the setup for a Syfy original series that will, mercifully, never exist.
Slasher Logic vs. Audience Sanity
Look, slashers have never been bastions of realism, and that’s fine. We don’t come to these movies for airtight plotting; we come for atmosphere, fun kills, memorable villains, and maybe a final girl we actually care about.
Trick fails the vibe check on almost every front:
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The kills are plentiful but rarely inventive—you’ve seen better in literally any mid-tier 2000s slasher.
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The pacing is choppy, constantly hopping in time instead of letting dread build.
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The dialogue flops between “cop show cliché” and “teen drama audition tape.”
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The Big Twist just muddies the waters instead of making rewatches more interesting.
Worst of all, Trick himself never becomes iconic. No memorable voice, no compelling motive beyond “Halloween, but murder,” no presence that lingers once the credits roll. He’s like a placeholder killer: [INSERT SLASHER HERE].
Final Verdict: Put This One Back in the Candy Bowl
Trick desperately wants to be a new Halloween staple, the kind of film you throw on every October while carving pumpkins and ignoring real-world responsibilities. Instead, it’s the cinematic equivalent of that one weird off-brand candy no kid actually wants, but somehow it keeps showing up in the bowl every year anyway.
If you’re in the mood for background noise and don’t mind yelling “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT” at your screen every five minutes, you might wring some ironic enjoyment out of it. Otherwise, your time is better spent rewatching a classic… or staring at a pumpkin and imagining a better movie.
In the end, Trick is less “trick or treat” and more “trick or… please stop.”
