I have a confession to make: the only reason I watched this is because I’ve been binge watching House MD and Omar Epps is in this. Sorry, not sorry.

Benton, NY 2015 on Halloween. A group of high school seniors are at a party and playing spin the bottle with a knife; Patrick ‘Trick’ Weaver takes his turn and is teased when it lands on another boy – Trick picks up the knife and begins a stabbing spree until he’s stabbed himself with a fire poker and hospitalised. Party host Cheryl, and friends Nicky and Troy are witnesses and few survivors of the attack; Troy claims he stabbed Trick with the poker, but other statements contradict him.

At the hospital, Sheriff Jayne and Detective Denver are assigned to the case; Denver demands the makeup that was under Trick’s mask be removed so he knows who he’s questioning. While Jayne leaves to do another task, Trick grabs Denver and flips the bed – having somehow undone his cuffs – and begins another killing spree in the hospital Jayne and Denver shoot him multiple times and he falls two stories through a window, when they go down to check the body, Trick is gone and only a shocked EMT is there.

Jayne and Denver believe Trick managed to slip into the river and his body in never found; during further interviews with survivors and classmates, no one can give them a matching description of Patrick, teachers tell them he’s a quiet student but no one has ever met his parents – his home address is a dockyard.

The two sided pumpkin mask disappears from evidence.

Riverton, NY 2016. Trick strikes a high school party and slips away.

Hudson Village, NY 2017. A Halloween party ends in bloodshed, Denver is convinced it’s Trick, who has an online following.

Shady Creek, NY 2018. Denver meets with two FBI agents in a bar, warning them that Trick is due to strike soon, as he’s following the river and Shady Creek is his target; the bartender tells them to leave the cop talk out of her bar. Trick kidnaps one of the agents in the toilets and ties him to an elaborate pulley that will slowly decapitate him; Denver and the other agent try to help, but Trick jumps on the weighted end – killing the agent and maiming his partner. Trick gives Denver the run around and manages to kill the second agent.

Trick’s cult following grows.

Benton, NY 2019. Denver has long since lost his job after the deaths of the FBI agents, he meets Cheryl – who had to return home after her dad’s work accident – and explains that he was forced to retire and is leaving town. Nicky invites Cheryl to the Halloween maze with her younger siblings.

At the hospital, Cheryl is visiting her dad and helping him relearn how to talk; the doctor informs her that the insurance is refusing to pay out on further bills as they opened an investigation, Cheryl is positive her dad fell and didn’t jump like some claim.

Across town, Trick has called out Denver in his latest victim’s blood.

Troy and his friends hear about the latest killing, but toast to Patrick’s demise and Troy’s heroics at the party years before; they decide to crash the Halloween event and horror maze. Elsewhere, Trick gives Denver another run around and lures Deputy Green to the harbor with false texts from Denver – he contacts Jayne to warn her and she arrives just as Green is injured by a trap; Jayne helps him back to her car, but Trick uses the crane to swing a gravestone through the windscreen, killing him. The gravestone belongs to one of the FBI agents Trick killed the previous year.

Denver and Jayne go to Cheryl’s old house to find Trick has been hiding there. Jayne calls for backup and Denver’s car is stolen.

At the Halloween event, Cheryl sees someone watching her from a car as she goes into the maze with Nicky and her siblings. Troy tries to sneak his friends into the horror film at the church – but is caught by Talbott and they’re all made to pay a ‘donation’; they quickly get bored of the film and head for the maze, Johnny stays behind.

Jayne and Denver arrive at the church after a call in about his car being seen there; they find another deputy killed at the scene and Denver goes into the maze to search for Trick. Jayne calls for more backup and goes inside the church when Deputy Slater arrives, telling Talbott that they think Patrick is alive and nearby; Talbott spots Trick and chases him up to the projector where Trick kills him and injures Jayne.

In the maze, Nicky’s siblings are scared of the actors and one runs away; Cheryl follows him and finds him hiding from an actor with a knife, she tells him the actor is harmless, not knowing it’s actually Trick.

Cheryl meets back with Nicky and Trick kills one of the actor’s in front of them, he injures Nicky and is scared away by Denver, who sends Cheryl and Nicky to the hospital before going back into the maze to evacuate; he runs into Troy, warning him that Trick is after anyone who harmed him that night in 2015 – Troy admits it wasn’t him but Cheryl who stabbed Trick with the poker and she didn’t remember due to shock, so he took credit. Denver and Jayne race to the hospital.

Cheryl goes to visit her dad while Nicky is getting treatment and sees a video of Trick pushing her dad off the roof; she discovers Trick as killed him in bed and knocks her out. Jayne, Denver and Slater arrive too late and set out to find Cheryl; Jayne and Denver find her in a construction area of the hospital and are ambushed by Trick. In the scuffle, Cheryl manages to shoot Trick multiple times and an injured Denver tackles him through a window – falling onto a parked car.

Trick, as he lays dying, admits he’s Johnny – Troy’s friend – and suddenly other people dressed as Trick turn up to take him away; Denver tries to stop them, but is stabbed multiple times by the other Tricks before Slater steps in to help him. Denver begins to recognise the others as the EMT from the night Patrick disappeared, the bartender from 2018 and…Deputy Slater!

The real Patrick rolls up in wheelchair and stabs Denver once more as his cult dispurses; Denver manages to push him from the wheelchair before falling unconscious just as Cheryl arrives with help. Cheryl aids Patrick back onto his chair an sees a scar, remembering she stabbed Trick in the same place; she follows him back into the hospital and sees him disposing of the two sided mask before he heads to security to delete video footage of them attacking Denver.

Patrick lets Cheryl into the room, and after a struggle she manages to kill him.

Meanwhile, Jayne is being attended to by a nurse when Slater comes in to says they’ve lost Trick and Denver might not survive his injuries; Jayne notices makeup he’d missed when wiping it off. Cheryl rolls Patrick into the room and announces she got ‘one of them’, explaining there’s a group doing his work; Jayne reveals to Slater that she knows his secret and kills him.

Sometime later, Cheryl, Jayne and Denver begin their search for other recruits of Trick’s cult.

3.5/5: Trick is a predictable concept that leaves more questions that it answers; I figured out Slater, at least, from the second he came onto the scene, but left wondering how and why Patrick was able to recruit people to do his bidding – especially one particular, easy to forget character revealed at the end. There were some interesting killings around the traditional slashings but the plot fell apart somewhere in the middle, leaving a confusing ending.