#4 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
The Black Sheep of the franchise, and it's one of the smarter sheep.
Imagine that they made Iron Man with Robert Downey, Jr. in 2008. It comes out to theaters, it's a smash hit, everyone loves it; it's time to make a sequel then, right? Keep the series going with Iron Man 2 in 2010. Same deal; Robert Downey, Jr. as Iron Man, only this time, the story has a conclusive ending that sees Tony Stark sacrifice himself to kill the enemy, effectively ending both lives. Boom. It comes out, it's a pretty big hit still, everyone likes it; so it's time to make a third one! Out, in 2013, comes Iron Man 3, and instead of Tony Stark, it features some divorce attorney named Steve fighting to keep his children in his custody whilst simultaneously training for his corporate office's big "iron man" triathlon in an effort to prove to his passive son that he's worth the time and effort to bond over.
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| "Yes, officer? I'd like to order a murder...I mean...pizza." |
Sounds pretty dumb, right? Well, in that scenario, yes. In this one, not so much. You see, Halloween II in 1981 was produced to cap off the Haddonfield, Michael Myers and Laurie Strode story that was introduced in '78 with Halloween. The definitive ending that was presented was that Loomis blows up Michael and himself in an operating room filled with oxygen released from tanks. Loomis lights a match and BOOM! He and Michael go up in flames. Michael teases that he's still alive by walking out of the inferno, but collapses and burns to death anyhow. Believe it or not, that was supposed to be it! Yeah, John Carpenter and Debra Hill did not want Michael Myers to start getting treated like some gimmicky slasher film villain that couldn't die, I guess. They wanted to kill off Michael Myers and Dr. Sam Loomis, so they did. You can't get much more "end-all" than a fucking explosion.
The plan then was to continue the Halloween franchise in a very interesting way. They wanted to turn the franchise into a horror-anthology series. Each film following Halloween II was going to tell a different Halloween-themed story with each sequel, maybe even doing more two-parters like Halloween and Halloween II. So, that's why Halloween III: Season of the Witch is what it is. It follows the story of Dan Challis, an emergency room doctor who cares for Harry Grimbridge, a man who was attacked on the side of the road by a mysterious figure in a car. That night, while in Dan's care, a mysterious intruder enters the hospital and kills Harry before immolating himself in his car in the parking lot. What follows is an investigation with Harry's daughter Ellie that leads Dan to the town of Santa Mira, California and the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory. Local townsfolk inform Dan that Conal Cochran is the reason for the prosperity in the town. During the night, Ellie is kidnapped by men dressed in suits and taken to the Silver Shamrock facility. There, Cochran reveals his master plan: to murder millions of children on Halloween night. Using remote sensors in his company's masks, he plans to release flesh eating creatures via a signal from a Silver Shamrock commercial onto the children's faces to eat them alive. Cochran reveals he wants to take Halloween back to its sacrificial roots of witchcraft and murder, starting with the children and young adults who wear his masks. The men in suits are revealed to be androids built and operated by Cochran and the Silver Shamrock Novelties company. The movie ends with Dan being attacked by Ellie, now an android, and making his way to a local gas station. There, he calls the local TV station to cut the commercials before they kill millions of kids. One of the commercials stays on too long despite his pleading leaving him to watch helplessly as he screams into the phone "STOP IT!"
Halloween III is very weird. Let's start off by saying that. When they wanted to distance the movie from the established universe, they couldn't have succeeded any better. Nothing about this movie makes any remote connection to the previous films except the scene where the original Halloween plays on a TV. The concept of taking Halloween back to its sacrificial roots by plotting the murder of millions of children on Halloween night is a fun plot, despite its morbid nature. The whole movie just reeks of some kind of story you'd find in a 50's science-fiction magazine that has a horror twist in it.
The acting is part hokey, part not. Tom Atkins does great as Dan Challis, moving to discover the mystery of Silver Shamrock Novelties company and fighting the androids that kidnapped Ellie. He genuinely goes from just an outsider looking in to being the guy who can stop all of this. His performance comes to a point at the end. The Halloween III cliffhanger ending is one of the best cliffhanger endings I've ever seen. Challis finds himself at a gas station/mechanic's shop on the phone with the TV networks, pleading them to kill the commercials before they can kill any children. The acting, his panicked and determined state of mind, is played out flawlessly. His sense of urgency is peaked when the commercials start playing. One-by-one, his pleading works as the networks kill commercial-after-commercial on different channels. Suddenly, one channel stays playing. "The third channel" won't stop playing the commercial. The kids who entered the gas station with their Silver Shamrock masks on watch it in awe, as Dan is in the background begging for the channel to be cut off. He screams "Stop it!" over and over again into the phone, and the audience is left to wonder whether or not the channel couldn't be shut off...or if the networks were in on Silver Shamrock's planned massacre. He screams into the phone one last desperate "STOP IT!" presumably as the children start dying in front of him. Very marvelously done. The ending is superb, and by my far my favorite part of the movie.
Conal Cochran is a creepy guy. He's also one of the greatest horror movie villains I've ever seen. He's well played by the late Dan O'Herlihy, who would go onto play the lead board member "The Old Man" in RoboCop and RoboCop 2. His speech whilst talking to the captured Challis is chilling. The man who wants to take Halloween back to the roots of burning witches at the stake and killing innocent people by sacrificing them to evil demons is scary as hell, and the magnitude of such a plan is conveyed excellently with his dialogue. "The festival of Sowan. The last great one took place over three thousand years ago when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. Sacrifices." He proclaims at one point in the film that "Halloween will be a very busy day for him" which seems like a simple phrase but is spooky in its own right.
That Silver Shamrock commercial is cheesy but brilliant. The music drones in your head as you watch the scene where Buddy Jr. is wearing his pumpkin mask watching the commercial in his room. You watch as the mask melts away and flesh-eating creatures get unleashed inside it on the boy's skull, feeding slowly and painfully as he dies in front of the TV. The music keeps playing as his parents both are killed by a rattlesnake that comes out of the mouth of the mask's remains. Challis and Cochran both look on in different ways as this happens. Cochran is an evil son of a bitch, and that commercial that he uses to kill people with his masks as tools is fucking awesome.
Now, we get to the elephant in the room. Please bear with me here as this part will be kind of an elitist rant moreso than a review. *Ahem*. Halloween III: Season of the Witch gets too much hate for not enough creative reasoning. Why? Well, it had a lot of potential with a great story and a brilliant cast when it was released, but nope. People wanted Michael Myers and were confused when Halloween III didn't have him in it. People wanted the same old thing over doing something original. Halloween wasn't made to be as recyclable and redundant as Friday the 13th, and this "horror anthology" idea should've taken off. But because people wanted the same old shtick of a serial killer that comes back, kills people, only to "die" at the end, Halloween III suffered upon release and continues to suffer. Horror audiences today seem to just blindly follow what they hear or what they want to hear and ignore this one entirely. Even when it got released with the Halloween Blu-ray boxset where some product reviews said that the box set "came with Halloween III for some reason" or "somehow had the balls to include Halloween III." Excuse me, reviewers of Blu-ray products, but in the interest of a spooky storytelling, a great plot, classic scenes and excellent acting, you're pointing your fingers at the wrong movie. Did none of you even watch Halloween II (2009)? You're telling me this movie out of all of them tarnishes the franchise? It isn't even connected to the same goddamn story! How does this tarnish the franchise?! You want to watch the movie that ruins the franchise, Halloween II (2009) is the one you're looking for. Halloween III: Season of the Witch did nothing wrong but try and tell a completely brand-new story. People, I guess, were and still are unfamiliar with the concept of an anthology series. People who love Tales from the Crypt hate Halloween III and it makes zero (ZERO) sense. Of course, if the anthology series idea continued we would've never gotten the greatness that is Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers so it's a mixed blessing.
So there, take it and leave it. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, in my opinion, is the fourth best Halloween movie. It's more suspenseful than Halloween: Resurrection, a lot smarter than Halloween 5, even creepier (in the right sense) than Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, feels more like the October-Halloween season than Halloween H2O, and...is just eons superior to Halloween II (2009). It's dark, well-paced, original, not-too-long, and masterfully portrayed. The characters are all well-acted, the music by Carpenter and Howarth is glorious, some scenes are cinematic classics, and the ending is one of the best endings to any movie in the history of cinema. Ever since high school, I've made a point to watch this at least once every Halloween, and with perfect reason.
(View this kick-ass ending here).
Now go watch Halloween II (2009) and learn which one these movies ACTUALLY sucks balls.
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| The masks produced by Silver Shamrock |
The acting is part hokey, part not. Tom Atkins does great as Dan Challis, moving to discover the mystery of Silver Shamrock Novelties company and fighting the androids that kidnapped Ellie. He genuinely goes from just an outsider looking in to being the guy who can stop all of this. His performance comes to a point at the end. The Halloween III cliffhanger ending is one of the best cliffhanger endings I've ever seen. Challis finds himself at a gas station/mechanic's shop on the phone with the TV networks, pleading them to kill the commercials before they can kill any children. The acting, his panicked and determined state of mind, is played out flawlessly. His sense of urgency is peaked when the commercials start playing. One-by-one, his pleading works as the networks kill commercial-after-commercial on different channels. Suddenly, one channel stays playing. "The third channel" won't stop playing the commercial. The kids who entered the gas station with their Silver Shamrock masks on watch it in awe, as Dan is in the background begging for the channel to be cut off. He screams "Stop it!" over and over again into the phone, and the audience is left to wonder whether or not the channel couldn't be shut off...or if the networks were in on Silver Shamrock's planned massacre. He screams into the phone one last desperate "STOP IT!" presumably as the children start dying in front of him. Very marvelously done. The ending is superb, and by my far my favorite part of the movie.
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| Silver Shamrock Novelties |
Conal Cochran is a creepy guy. He's also one of the greatest horror movie villains I've ever seen. He's well played by the late Dan O'Herlihy, who would go onto play the lead board member "The Old Man" in RoboCop and RoboCop 2. His speech whilst talking to the captured Challis is chilling. The man who wants to take Halloween back to the roots of burning witches at the stake and killing innocent people by sacrificing them to evil demons is scary as hell, and the magnitude of such a plan is conveyed excellently with his dialogue. "The festival of Sowan. The last great one took place over three thousand years ago when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children. Sacrifices." He proclaims at one point in the film that "Halloween will be a very busy day for him" which seems like a simple phrase but is spooky in its own right.
That Silver Shamrock commercial is cheesy but brilliant. The music drones in your head as you watch the scene where Buddy Jr. is wearing his pumpkin mask watching the commercial in his room. You watch as the mask melts away and flesh-eating creatures get unleashed inside it on the boy's skull, feeding slowly and painfully as he dies in front of the TV. The music keeps playing as his parents both are killed by a rattlesnake that comes out of the mouth of the mask's remains. Challis and Cochran both look on in different ways as this happens. Cochran is an evil son of a bitch, and that commercial that he uses to kill people with his masks as tools is fucking awesome.
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| Whaddya mean I gotta watch House of 1000 Corpses? |
So there, take it and leave it. Halloween III: Season of the Witch, in my opinion, is the fourth best Halloween movie. It's more suspenseful than Halloween: Resurrection, a lot smarter than Halloween 5, even creepier (in the right sense) than Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, feels more like the October-Halloween season than Halloween H2O, and...is just eons superior to Halloween II (2009). It's dark, well-paced, original, not-too-long, and masterfully portrayed. The characters are all well-acted, the music by Carpenter and Howarth is glorious, some scenes are cinematic classics, and the ending is one of the best endings to any movie in the history of cinema. Ever since high school, I've made a point to watch this at least once every Halloween, and with perfect reason.
(View this kick-ass ending here).
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