"You don't really know much about Halloween. You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy..."
With leaves decaying in autumnal cascades of red, with temperatures dropping and nights encroaching…well, even without certain seasonal holidays approaching, there’s no better time than to discuss things mad and macabre. And in turn what better way to kick things off than something that stands out in both memorability and weirdness—it’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
The original Halloween, alongside the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is arguably the point where modern horror movies as we know them properly kicked off—and after its sequel, our iconic horror director John Carpenter chose to produce something different, taking things in an anthology turn. In retrospect, this may have come off in a similar way to how, say, current audiences would react if, I dunno, the next Paranormal Activity film became something about killer mobility scooters—but still, it certainly ended up standing out amid its own series, and even among other genre flicks to this day.
Instead of focusing on a masked serial killer, here we have something that tackles the actual holiday of Halloween itself—we follow a hospital doctor and his impromptu partner Ellie (Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin) who, after a strange murder, decides to investigate a company producing masks for the day ( whose infuriatingly catching advertising jingle permeates the whole flick). The aforementioned Silver Shamrock company indeed stands in for commercialization of the whole thing and in general—targeting kids for consumption in more ways than one, it turns out.
And why yes, it goes start to get weird from there. It turns out we’re dealing with robots who may or may not be powered by some weird Celtic magic, cursed silicon chips apparently infused with tiny fragments of Stonehenge…there’s some moments that are slightly surreal and baffling, and at times it’s a little difficult to parse what the hell you may have just seen on the screen. Perhaps you might even think that the writers may have gorged themselves on too much Halloween candy that just happened to be laced with LSD.
But at the same time, that doesn’t mean the movie isn’t entertaining and watchable, which it sure as hell is precisely because of that weirdness. And there’s the legitimate highlights—foremost of which is Dan O’Herlihy as company chief Cochrane, who is clearly having a blast in the role. He utterly sells the friendly old uncle persona that Cochrane puts off to the point where you think it’s a genuine characteristic of the character—which makes one certain scene where he unveils his scheme all the more chilling. One genuinely creepy scene is when Cochrane drops his act for just a moment to expound on the ancient rites of the Samhain festival, thickening his accent as he talks of sacrifices old—delightfully effective.
This off-kilter mix of the genuine and the baffling continues to the end, where we get one inexplicable plot twist followed by one hell of a memorable ending as Atkins tries manically to save the day—and that leaves us with a film that for me isn’t really a misunderstood masterpiece like some claim it is, but one that makes for some slightly cheesy fun times. However, audiences back then were just plain confused, and the studio mandated that the sequels returned back to the template set by the first film. And in all honesty, it was all downhill from there—many things can be said about the next Halloween films, and most of them involve annoyance and headache-inducing bafflement.
Which perhaps makes many appreciate Halloween 3 all the more—for its flaws, it’s got a deliciously dark undercurrent of satire running through it, succeeding in making silly TV commercials feel scary. Between that and the slight surrealism, it feels unique even divorced from its franchise, and that is enough for some to forgive some off-kilterness. Grab some candy and give it a watch—you won’t forget it either way…
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