Halloween III: Season of the WitchHalloween doesn't mean the same thing today as it did hundreds--even thousands--of years ago, when it was called "Samhain" (or "Sauin"). These days, it is largely a commercial festival, known for costumes, trick-or-treating, scary movies, and so on. But its ancient Celtic roots were a celebration of the dead, when the barrier between our world and the afterlife was at its thinnest, and all manner of entities might come forth and walk among us. And some even performed sacrifices to appease those dark forces that were believed to control our world...
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Despite being a part of the Halloween series of movies, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is divergent from the rest of its brethren. For starters, it is the only entry not to feature the silent, nubile teen-slaying slasher icon, Michael Myers, and it is also not directed by John Carpenter, who directed the prior two films; it is co-produced by Carpenter, who also co-wrote the music. Instead, Halloween III is written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace in his directorial debut; he was an art director and production designer for the prior two movies. While virtually all other slasher franchises feature their antagonists front and center, Carpenter (and co-producer, Debra Hill) envisioned the Halloween movies to be an anthology series, something that has only recently gained more traction in the horror movie genre. Instead of being a slasher, Halloween III shares more in common with the occult and conspiracy-laden horror films of the Seventies, including Rosemary's Baby, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Stepford Wives. (Regretably, Halloween III borrows a little too liberally from these classics, instead becoming a hodge-podge mess like when kids try to blend all the paint colors together to make a rainbow, only to produce a muddy brown.) Purists may cry foul at the absence of Michael Myers, but the real issue with this movie is how it fails to meaningfully embrace any one of the assorted sci-fi/horror tropes it samples. The movie starts with a scared old man--later revealed to be a toy vendor named Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry)--who is being pursued by a pair of creepily stiff men in business suits. (Yet despite being seemingly possessed of super strength, these killers are easily neutralized by a slow-moving car.) The panicked Harry eventually is taken to a hospital, where Dr. Daniel "Dan" Challis (Tom Atkins) notices that Harry is clutching a Halloween mask made by the ubiquitous Silver Shamrock company, based out of the fictional town of Santa Mira--another nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. After Harry is brutally slain in his hospital bed by one of these assassins, Dan chases the man to the parking lot...but fails to stop him from immolating himself before the police arrive.
Dan is the protagonist of Halloween III, but he feels like less of a complex character than a collection of detective story or thriller cliches reminiscent of The Big Sleep or The Parallax View. He seems more comfortable in a bar with a drink in his hand than he does spending time with his two children, who live with his exasperated ex-wife, Linda (Nancy Kyes). One senses that Dan's marital woes likely stemmed from his flirtatious personality, and the apparently effortless way he (somehow) manages to appeal to other women, a la Philip Marlowe. A few days before Halloween, as Dan is sitting in a bar (of course), he is approached by Harry's surviving daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), who asks for his help to find out what happened between the time Harry went to procure some masks from Silver Shamrock's factory and the time of his death. Wishing to make sense of the circumstances behind the grisly death of his patient, Dan agrees, and the two trek to Santa Mira and quizzically pose as man and wife, renting a room at the town motel as their base of operations. Even though they have no reason to suspect Silver Shamrock has any direct responsibility for Harry's death, they assume that the mask company must be involved somehow. (Now, neither Dan nor Ellie are professional investigators, and while they aren't dumb, this is quite a leap in logic.) Of course, Halloween III insinuates that something rotten is afoot in Santa Mira in many ways, even before they arrive. First, there are the creepy commercials that appear everywhere and count down the days until Halloween to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down", which for reasons that are never made clear, captivates all nearby children into staring intently at the screen and to put on their Silver Shamrock masks as they do it. (For making apparently little more than latex Halloween masks--by hand, no less--Silver Shamrock must have an incredible advertising budget.) And then there is the nigh-fanatic reverence everyone in Santa Mira has for the boss of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), even though the town looks more like a dilapidated relic from the Thirties than a thriving community. Not to mention the myriad CCTV cameras and mysterious 6 p.m. curfew, which must apparently be just a suggestion, since Dan freely goes out to the liquor store afterward to buy booze. But even with the frequent reminders that Halloween is coming fast--implying via constant updates that something dire will happen on the thirty-first--Dan and Ellie seem too comfortable in just settling in for their first night...and falling into bed together (of course)--never mind that Ellie's probably still grieving over her recently murdered father.
The final act of Halloween III is where the movie starts dumping its assorted sci-fi/horror influences out on the audience. The affable Cochran is a career toymaker and novelty gag producer. Yet it turns out that he is secretly a witch (or warlock, or whatever), albeit a very business-minded one, and the nigh-superhuman killers in three-piece suits from before are actually clockwork automatons which he has made to be his personal army. Furthermore, after he captures Dan and Ellie, he reveals that his master plan is to offer up the children of America as a sacrifice to whatever dark forces rule the cosmos, in an effort to restore Halloween to its rightful place as a pagan holiday rooted in witchcraft. How does he plan to do this? By slapping some Silver Shamrock logos on the backs of his masks with built-in computer chips, augmented by particulates stripped from a stolen menhir from Stonehenge, of course! When Cochran broadcasts a flashing TV signal of a scanline jack-o'-lantern, the microchips activate and melt the poor child's head, and then a bunch of snakes and crickets crawl out...because reasons. Cochran demonstrates his master plan on the obnoxious kid of his finest salesman (nice incentive to upsell there, boss), and then ties Dan to a chair and plops a mask on him as well. And how does Dan get out of this pickle? By breaking the TV and cutting himself free, crawling through the vents like John McClane, and sneaking past the clockwork sentries while pushing a convenient trolley of masks that somehow no one notices. But the coup de grace has to be when he unloads a box of badges onto the robot army from the catwalk after somehow activating the lethal broadcast--don't know how he figured which buttons to push--which apparently destroys them, too. In this final act, we've got an army of killer robots, occult conspiracies, and a scheme for a mass sacrifice; any one of these would have been enough for Cochran, but we get all three, and Dan manages to (almost) nullify them all with one lucky break. Best of all, he does all this with "Ellie" by his side, only for her to later reveal herself to be a killer robot--after Cochran's is apparently disintegrated by the exploding menhir. (I didn't realize that rocks were combustible.) So the unanswered question is: why didn't Robo-Ellie stop him before Dan killed her creator? Instead, she tries to strangle him in the getaway car, leading to a car crash. And in a final bit of unintended comedy, no less than three times do her disembodied limbs try to finish the job. By the time the credits roll for Halloween III, it's difficult to say what the most implausible thing in this movie was.
Recommended for: Fans of the "so bad, it's good" style of horror movie. Halloween III is a novel concept--that is, making an anthology horror movie series, which actually was ahead of its time--but it is too unfocused and contrived to be considered a serious effort, and likely inadvertently subverted the effort, subsequently prompting the return of Michael Myers.
Dan is the protagonist of Halloween III, but he feels like less of a complex character than a collection of detective story or thriller cliches reminiscent of The Big Sleep or The Parallax View. He seems more comfortable in a bar with a drink in his hand than he does spending time with his two children, who live with his exasperated ex-wife, Linda (Nancy Kyes). One senses that Dan's marital woes likely stemmed from his flirtatious personality, and the apparently effortless way he (somehow) manages to appeal to other women, a la Philip Marlowe. A few days before Halloween, as Dan is sitting in a bar (of course), he is approached by Harry's surviving daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), who asks for his help to find out what happened between the time Harry went to procure some masks from Silver Shamrock's factory and the time of his death. Wishing to make sense of the circumstances behind the grisly death of his patient, Dan agrees, and the two trek to Santa Mira and quizzically pose as man and wife, renting a room at the town motel as their base of operations. Even though they have no reason to suspect Silver Shamrock has any direct responsibility for Harry's death, they assume that the mask company must be involved somehow. (Now, neither Dan nor Ellie are professional investigators, and while they aren't dumb, this is quite a leap in logic.) Of course, Halloween III insinuates that something rotten is afoot in Santa Mira in many ways, even before they arrive. First, there are the creepy commercials that appear everywhere and count down the days until Halloween to the tune of "London Bridge is Falling Down", which for reasons that are never made clear, captivates all nearby children into staring intently at the screen and to put on their Silver Shamrock masks as they do it. (For making apparently little more than latex Halloween masks--by hand, no less--Silver Shamrock must have an incredible advertising budget.) And then there is the nigh-fanatic reverence everyone in Santa Mira has for the boss of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), even though the town looks more like a dilapidated relic from the Thirties than a thriving community. Not to mention the myriad CCTV cameras and mysterious 6 p.m. curfew, which must apparently be just a suggestion, since Dan freely goes out to the liquor store afterward to buy booze. But even with the frequent reminders that Halloween is coming fast--implying via constant updates that something dire will happen on the thirty-first--Dan and Ellie seem too comfortable in just settling in for their first night...and falling into bed together (of course)--never mind that Ellie's probably still grieving over her recently murdered father.
The final act of Halloween III is where the movie starts dumping its assorted sci-fi/horror influences out on the audience. The affable Cochran is a career toymaker and novelty gag producer. Yet it turns out that he is secretly a witch (or warlock, or whatever), albeit a very business-minded one, and the nigh-superhuman killers in three-piece suits from before are actually clockwork automatons which he has made to be his personal army. Furthermore, after he captures Dan and Ellie, he reveals that his master plan is to offer up the children of America as a sacrifice to whatever dark forces rule the cosmos, in an effort to restore Halloween to its rightful place as a pagan holiday rooted in witchcraft. How does he plan to do this? By slapping some Silver Shamrock logos on the backs of his masks with built-in computer chips, augmented by particulates stripped from a stolen menhir from Stonehenge, of course! When Cochran broadcasts a flashing TV signal of a scanline jack-o'-lantern, the microchips activate and melt the poor child's head, and then a bunch of snakes and crickets crawl out...because reasons. Cochran demonstrates his master plan on the obnoxious kid of his finest salesman (nice incentive to upsell there, boss), and then ties Dan to a chair and plops a mask on him as well. And how does Dan get out of this pickle? By breaking the TV and cutting himself free, crawling through the vents like John McClane, and sneaking past the clockwork sentries while pushing a convenient trolley of masks that somehow no one notices. But the coup de grace has to be when he unloads a box of badges onto the robot army from the catwalk after somehow activating the lethal broadcast--don't know how he figured which buttons to push--which apparently destroys them, too. In this final act, we've got an army of killer robots, occult conspiracies, and a scheme for a mass sacrifice; any one of these would have been enough for Cochran, but we get all three, and Dan manages to (almost) nullify them all with one lucky break. Best of all, he does all this with "Ellie" by his side, only for her to later reveal herself to be a killer robot--after Cochran's is apparently disintegrated by the exploding menhir. (I didn't realize that rocks were combustible.) So the unanswered question is: why didn't Robo-Ellie stop him before Dan killed her creator? Instead, she tries to strangle him in the getaway car, leading to a car crash. And in a final bit of unintended comedy, no less than three times do her disembodied limbs try to finish the job. By the time the credits roll for Halloween III, it's difficult to say what the most implausible thing in this movie was.
Recommended for: Fans of the "so bad, it's good" style of horror movie. Halloween III is a novel concept--that is, making an anthology horror movie series, which actually was ahead of its time--but it is too unfocused and contrived to be considered a serious effort, and likely inadvertently subverted the effort, subsequently prompting the return of Michael Myers.