Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) Starring Tom Atkins, Ellie Grimbridge & Dan O'Herlihy Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace Written by Tommy Lee Wallace & Nigel Kneale

For the October edition of this e-zine, I offered to do two reviews. One was Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, a movie BthroughZ creator/editor suggested. The other was a movie I’ve always liked, even though it’s universally panned: Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

My neighborhood video store doesn’t have Halloween III: Season of the Witch, so I’ve decided to change things up a bit. Typically, I’ll have given the movie I’m reviewing a few days to digest. Then the review will be typed up at my office and sent to Jamie for posting. Not having the H3, but still wanting to review it, I’ve opted to get tanked and write-up a movie I haven’t seen in at least a decade. I’ve polished off my first bottle of five-dollar shiraz and just popped the cork on a second.


Halloween III: Season of the Witch

To the best of my memory, the Halloween series was envisioned as such: Halloween was to be a series of movies. Each installment would focus on a different tale, each taking place on Halloween night. The first was about a child-killer all grown-up and hell bent on murdering the last surviving member of his family. Michael Myers was a human incarnate of The Blob. He moved slowly and was impervious to pain. The original screenplay was epic, spilling into a second movie to tell the events of that fateful night. (The second installment has two of the greatest moments in the annals of fright cinema. The first being a kid with a razor blade lodged in his tongue. The second is Michael Myers calmly walking through a glass door that shatters at his touch.) For the third Halloween, the producers opted to continue with the original idea and tell a different story about the hallowed night. It was deemed a colossal failure. Critics panned it. Audiences hated it, wanting more of Michael Myers. The Shape (as Myers was known in the screenplay) was brought back in the sequels, which worked only prove the law of diminishing returns. (Which is extremely saddening when one sees the potential that went to waste in Halloween 5. Part Four ends in one of the greatest cliffhangers of the past 20 years. An imprisoned Myers sits in a jail cell. An explosion levels a wall. A pair of cowboy boots enters the frame. They walk past the debris on the jail floor, coming to a stop at Michael’s cell. He rises. Roll Credits. FUCK!) I’m not sure how accurate the above is. I’m just spitting out what some older kid told me in junior high. I’m inclined to believe him. He said he got with over thirty girls.

The major contention people have is the lack of Michael Myers. People came to Halloween expecting a space and time defying figure in a modified Billy Shatner mask to slice up teens. Instead, they got a mysterious corporation with some pretty fucking lascivious intentions. That my neighborhood video store carries every Halloween title, except the third tells that audiences refuse to recognize this movie. It’s become the ex-communicated Saint, or the washed-up athlete: Left behind like Kirk Cameron. Had it not been for the association to the franchise; it would be in the same canon as The Stuff.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch centers around a line of Silver Shamrock Halloween masks. Already a sensation on store shelves, the manufacturer has a national ad campaign reminding children that on Halloween night, they’re to put on their masks and gather around the TV to watch a special broadcast. We follow a man who is sent to find out more about this mysterious company. He might have been a journalist. Or possibly a detective. I don’t remember and it really doesn’t matter; we just need his eyes to see the inner-workings of this company. In a movie, every scene should give us something. Be it information, or some ordeal/conflict that engrosses us. H3 was a little light on this. There are too many moments where our hero just gives a quizzical look. (Not unlike Se7en, or Donnie Darko. Two movies in which our lead(s) just walk around puzzled by everything until the story happens to bump into them.) I could never put my finger on it, but there’s something in H3 that feels like the production was fueled by cocaine. I don’t mean the trademark Dennis Hopper yelling and biting coke-binge. The actors seem to have been up for three-days and finally dragged onto the set. Anyone familiar with porn from the same era knows exactly what I’m talking about.

Spoilers Herein.

So what is the Special Broadcast that the kids can’t miss? We’re treated to a test-run conducted on a target family. Each mask is adorned with a Silver Shamrock logo. When the broadcast begins, the logo is activated – not unlike the Captain Power toys I could never afford as a kid . . . stupid lower middle-class family. Though the complete workings of the mask are obscured, we can gather that it liquefies the kids head, then shoots snakes out of the eye holes. The snakes then kill the rest of the family. As a student of economics, I must say that’s it’s a rather efficient model. The snakes offing the next-of-kin ensure maximum killing per household, something neo-classical economists are very stringent upon.

The closing of Halloween III: Season of the Witch ends on the same note of paranoia as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A bleak, “fuck you” to viewers. If a great institution has designs on you, there’s not really much you can do. Be it invaders from another planet, or a company on they NYSE – we’re nothing more than ants in scale.

Halloween III also plays upon the event of Halloween itself. In the spirit of the holiday, we send out children to walk the streets at night to go to strange home, after strange home. There’s a running theme in the movies I review: That inability to protect yourself and the people you love. There isn’t a moment in our day where we’re not as vulnerable as any other prey in the animal kingdom. With Halloween, we can’t guarantee the homes and candy the kids will be subject to are safe. We instead keep this notion that bad things do happen, but not to us – not my kids – not my home. Halloween is a holiday we’re practically daring something to happen.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch calls our bluff.