• Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace
• Written by Tommy Lee Wallace (and Nigel Keane, uncredited)
• Starring
  • Tom Atkins
  • Stacey Nelkin
  • Dan O’Herlihy
  • Michael Currie
  • Ralph Strait
• Produced by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
• Executive produced by Moustapha Akkad, Joseph Wolf, and Irwin Yablans

I know that 90% of my readers know the saga of the Halloween franchise, but for the sake of the few who are uninformed through no fault of their own, allow me a brief recap:

Even before John Carpenter directed the first Halloween (1978), it was invisioned as a movie series. Not as a franchise revolving around a single character and continuity, though, and certainly not around Michael Myers; there hadn’t been a continuing horror franchise revolving around a particular character for decades, and there had never been one that revolved around a non-monster killer. (Remember, this was before the Friday the 3th series, the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and every other attempt to start a horror franchise though the ’80s.) Instead, the Halloween movies were envisioned as a feature-length anthology series; the only connection between the films was to be that the events in them happened around Halloween — which, not coincidentally, was when they’d be released.

That plan was dealt a blow, ironically, by the the success of the first movie in the series beyond all expectations; it became the highest-grossing independent movie to that point (and would hold that honor until 1999’s Blair Witch Project finally outdid it). Halloween wasn’t the first slasher film — its direct precedents were the Italian giallo films of the ’60s and ’70s, and of course Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) preceded them all — but it brought the idea into the American mainstream, and naturally, its success inspired scores of imitators (including, naturally, some of the aforementioned Italians). By the time John Carpenter, producer/co-writer Debra Hill,and executive producers Moustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans turned their attention to the next installment in the series (with Carpenter taking a producer role instead of directing this time), Halloween-style slasher films were a genre unto themselves, and Carpenter saw no alternative but to make the second film in the series a sequel to the first one.

By the time the window for the second sequel rolled around in 1982, no matter what Carpenter and Co. had intended on paper, the Halloween series was associated intimately with silent Michael Myers and his painted-white Captain Kirk mask. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch may have been a last-ditch attempt to wrench the series back to its original trajectory, but in the moviegoing public scratched their collective heads at what appeared to them to be bewildering departure from the premise of the franchise, an in-name-only sequel that held no appeal for the fans of the first two. Maybe Halloween 3 would have gotten a better reception, even from those who felt suckered out their ticket money by the implied promise of yet another slasher flick, if it had been a good movie in its own right. But it was instead a very silly movie, which is possibly even a worse transgression for a horror movie than being cliched, threadbare, and derivative.

Gosh, these innovative masks are sure going to take the nation by storm!

The first scene of the movie, delivered to the audience before they have any idea of the premise of the story, displays in microcosm the problems which pervade the whole movie: bending the story to the unsupportable tastes of what someone thought would be “cool,” rather than showing people who behave in a rational (or even understandably irrational) manner. Given how the original Halloween derived so much of its power from a stripped-down non-supernatural killer who didn’t abide by convenient horror movie tropes (through he invented a whole new set of them), the unsupportable story elements which drive this whole movie are extra disappointing.

The first scene in question, on Saturday, October 23rd: A lone older man (Al Berry) runs down a semi-secluded road at night; in the distance behind him, car headlights pursue him. He runs into an empty auto salvage yard and bangs on the door of the locked office while the car slows down and stops at the entrance to the yard… then continues on its way. Before the old gent can breathe a sigh of relief, the car backs up again to the entrance of the yard. Then he suddenly find behind him — a blank-faced twenty-something white guy in a suit! (I don’t know how much input Carpenter had into Nigel Kneale’s script, but anyone who’s seen They Live (1988), which Carpenter directed six years later, might suspect there’s a recurring theme here.) After a brief struggle in which his suited opponent seemingly dies, the old gent continues his scurry until he reaches a nearby gas station and collapses on the front step.

Now, since I made a big deal about the problems of the first scene, let me enumerate them. See, the thing about night is that it’s dark, and if you’re a lone guy without a vehicle, it’s easier to hide than to evade pursuit on wheels. That’s even more the case with the auto yard, which is chock-full of hiding places; if only the fella had rubbed two brain cells together, he would have realized that it was more use hiding and waiting for his pursuers to wander away than to climb the steps to the lighted door and bang on it, hoping that someone would be inside in the middle of the night. Yet this same man, so clueless in hide-and-seek, has the presence of mind while the twenty-something suit is strangling him to reach out and grab the chain on a block wedged under the tire of nearby car so that the car rolls forward and crushes the suit.

No, I won’t be examining the entire movie in that kind of detail; this ain’t Jabootu: The Bad Movie Dimension, after all. I just wanted to point out that the entire movie, from the opening moments, exhibits character behavior which, immediately after, invites the audience to wonder why they did what they did. (Unless, instead of immediately after, the audience starts to wonder while the characters are mid-action, which response the movie also invites with regularity.)

“No, I know who your father is. By ‘Who’s your daddy,’ I meant… Aw, skip it.”

The old duffer ends up at the hospital, where he’s admitted into the care of Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins, a holdover from Carpenter’s The Fog (1980) and one of the many perfect elements of Night of the Creeps (1986)). We’ve already had a scene with Dr. Dan, which establishes that (a) he’s divorced, (b) he has two kids, (c) he has lousy taste in Halloween masks, (d) that’s okay because his ex-wife (Nancy Kyes, aka “Nancy Loomis” from the first two Halloween films) has already bought the kids a couple of Silver Shamrock masks, the hottest thing this year, and (e) the ex is a screechy harridan who seems to think that it’s all Dan’s fault when he has to respond to a trauma call from the E/R. How dare you be a doctor!!!

Curiously, although they’ve transferred the older man to a gurney and changed him into and open-buttocked hospital gown, they’ve left in his hand the one object he’s been clutching since we first saw him: a latex pumpkin mask. He then gasps a cryptic, “They’re going to kill us! All of us!”

Later that night, visitor sneaks into the hospital and tracks down the old man (all right, we’ll name him: Harry Grimbridge): A spooky blank-faced guy in a suit! And where to begin with this? He goes to great lengths to put on gloves for reasons which will soon become nonsensical; he grabs the bedridden Harry through his eyes and pulls until the front of his skull pops; he methodically wipes the blood off on a curtain; then he walks back out to his car, douses himself with gasoline, and blows himself up. He does this without being especially sneaky in his entrance and egress, so why bother with the gloves? Why wipe off the blood if he’s just going to torch himself? Why kill the man before finding out what he told whom?

Dr. Dan is of course upset by this, especially because he has to call his ex and tell her why he won’t be over to pick up the kids. How dare you be a part of a police investigation, you doctor! Also distraught is Grimbridge’s daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), who arrives to ID the body. As there’s a male lead and a female lead, I think it’s pretty apparent that there are going to be romantic sparks a-flying, and I guess all involved decided that that assumption of romance was really all that was needed. Not only are is Dan easily old enough to be Ellie’s father (there’s a twenty-four year difference between the actors), but there’s not even a glimmer of chemistry between them until several scenes later when they start kissing. I’m going to have to blame a large part of this on Nelkin; she’s very cute and fine-featured, but if you used this movie as evidence you’d have a hard time proving that she has any personality at all.

Because she’s distraught at the mysterious death of her father, because he’s disturbed that a suicidal killer struck a patient under his care, and because he’s Tom Atkins and she’s hawt, they eventually join forces to find out what happened to him (after they burn a couple of days — I’m all for a ticking clock in movies, but it seems like they started this one ticking too soon). Since Dad’s address book shows that the last thing he hadn’t accomplished was picking up some more Silver Shamrock masks for his five-and-dime store, they follow his route to the town of Santa Mira, home to the Silver Shamrock Novelty Co.

“William Shatner masks? Not much of a demand for those, I’m afraid.”

And what a town it is. The tourist info they pick up say that it was invigorated post-war by the arrival of Irish immigrant Conal Cochran, who not only gave the town its major industry, but gave everything a flavore greene and faire. The whole town is dominated by little businesses named after Irish towns or surnames; I’m surprised they didn’t pass an ordinance to rename it all “Saint O’Mira.” Not only that, it’s one of those small towns where an unfamiliar car rolling down the streets is enough to make the locals stop and stare ominously. I’ve been in lots of small towns in more out-of-the-way areas than northern California, but I’ve never been in any place that xenophobic — especially one which centers on a manufacturing plant which continuously draws buyers and suppliers.

After Dan and Ellie check into a motel run by a man who sounds like every Lucky Charms commercial ever made rolled into one, they start checking out the town and encountering ominous stuff… which doesn’t make any sense. For future aspiring screenwriters, here are some helpful hints derived from watching Halloween 3: If your plot requires that other minor characters stop for no reason and drop steaming lumps of exposition on the protagonists’ Hush Puppies just to move the story along — not once, not twice, but three times — you probably need to rethink things. And if even after that, your bad guy has to reveal himself and go through a long monologue about his nefarious plans because otherwise the protagonists still wouldn’t have a clue as to what’s going on, you have got some definite story problems.

And frankly, if the antagonist’s grand scheme is to steal a standing stone from Stonehenge and put a little fleck of it inside a computer chip attached to every Halloween mask he sells that will be activated by a special TV commercial which will cause crickets and snakes to burst forth from the heads of the children wearing the masks because that’ll make this the best Samhain in three thousand years, you might just want to junk the whole story and start over. The good news is that, once you’ve established all this, you can throw in the detail that the antagonist’s henchmen are all clockwork automatons and you won’t do any more damage to the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Night of the Living Junior Executives.

Seriously, that’s the nefarious plan. Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy — the one true Irishman in the cast, and the only Irish character who doesn’t sport a “foine foine top o’ the marnin’” accent), owner of Silver Shamrock, has put this whole Rube Goldbergian scheme in place for reasons that defy comprehension, even after it’s all been explained. It’s sad that the only common element between Halloween 2 to Halloween 3 is that damned Druid angle that everyone hated in Halloween 2. (Maybe John Carpenter had British Pagans on the brain in the early ’80s. I dunno.)

Now, maybe I’d be able to forgive such a jaw-droppingly inane central premise if the movie was otherwise competent. Okay, I probably wouldn’t. But I can say that without danger of being contradicted because no one will ever know how I would react to a hypothetically competent Halloween 3. All I know is that the Halloween 3 we were given in this iteration of the multiverse has problems which almost eclipse the idea of Stonehenge dust in microchips attached to Halloween masks. Remember my comments on the first scene? Remember my comments on the killing in the hospital? It just goes on. Cochran’s clockwork minions continue to kill people who might have something to tell, but in ways that will arouse at least as much suspicion as the leaks they silence. Elements are introduced to the story and firmly established, then forgotten. (Why make such a big deal about showing that Santa Mira has a strictly enforced curfew of 6pm, and then show Dan coming out of an open liquor store on the main street much later?) Scenes which have no bearing on the story are shown in puzzling order (exactly why was it so important to know that Ellie gets out of the shower that we have a stand-alone scene showing it, sans nudity?) And in a display of Californicentrism stunning even for Hollywood, whoever made this movie forgot that having the scheme come to fruition exactly at 9pm across America means that it happens three times before it strikes in California.

There are a couple of vaguely competent scenes scattered here and there. One that took my by surprise involved Dan, trapped and on the run in the Silver Shamrock factory, stopping to call home and plead with his ex to take the Silver Shamrock masks away from their kids; alas, she is too busy screeching and condemning his bad parenting to listen to a word he says. But one or two scenes are insufficient to leaven this loaf.

“Just think about the paycheck… the big, big paycheck…”

Given the derision which Halloween 3 rightly received from critics and audiences, it’s no surprise that the producers threw up their hands and junked for good the original plans for the Halloween movie series and turned it into a Michael Myers franchise (without Carpenter behind the camera or Jamie Lee Curris in front of it). There was at least a lukewarm audience for warmed-over retreads of the original Halloween; nobody, meanwhile, was clamoring for Halloween 3: Part 2.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9 (plus implied collateral damage)
• breasts: 0 (two almosts, but no cookies)
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 5
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Paddi Edwards (“Silver Shamrock Secretary”) played “Anya” in the TNG episode “The Dauphin”
  • Martin Cassidy (“Watcher”) played “Male Villager” in the DS9 episode “Shadowplay”