*** SPOILERS BELOW ***
Karma has a strange way of working. Enough people had told me that I was blasphemous for not liking John Carpenter’s classic 1978 slasher Halloween. I didn’t listen to them because I have a right to my opinion. I just thought it was overrated. But, Fate didn’t want me to think that way. So, I got Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
The reputation of this film likely proceeds it; if you clicked on this review it was so that you could see me rip apart. I don’t like that term—someone made a movie, so there’s no reason to take what they thought was a celluloid masterpiece and dissect it in a negative fashion. All the same, though, there are bad movies out there. That’s a fact of life, and it’s a hard fact. My tolerance for film goes very far. I love horror movies, I love slasher movies, and I love gore movies. That means that a number of movies that I watch are just plain bad, and I can’t help that. There are more bad movies than good ones, but someone made them. I can’t bring myself to really HATE a film, per se, unless it does something to piss me off. I’ve met movies like that. And that’s why I have to say—despite everything its rep implies—I do not think that Halloween III is a bad movie.
Dan Challis is a doctor who takes in a guy who claims that a harmless-looking, albeit extremely annoying Halloween mask commercial is out to kill everyone. That night some guy comes in and crushes his brain by reaching into his eyes (just like how Michael stabs his thumb into that guy’s brain in Halloween IV!) before the killer immolates himself. He meets the guy’s daughter, who recruits him to go out on a quest to find out who killed her father and why. They go to an Irish immigrant town called Santa Mira (which was the name of the town from Invasion of the Body Snatchers!) where they find the factory that is producing the masks that the irksome commercial advertises, part of a company called Silver Shamrock Novelties. Everyone there worships this guy named Conal Cochrane, who owns Silver Shamrock. Everyone except a woman named Marge and a drunken guy wandering around past curfew, but Marge gets her mouth shot with a laser from a Silver Shamrock button and the drunk gets his head pulled off. Oh, and there’s an annoying family that shows up with an obese guy who calls his son “Lidd-ul Bud-ee” and his wife who is either always doing aerobics or laughing.
What’s so strange about this part of the movie is that none of it lasts long. You’d think the family would stalk us and annoy the crap out of us until they died, but they don’t. Marge and the drunk only exist to show that something in the town is evil. Details like this, I think, really separate it from the bad movie crowd. It’s some sort of tottering balance, some Libra’s Lever that really justifies its existence.
So, Dan and Ellie get a free tour of the factory led by Mr. Cochrane himself—the annoying family shows up again but they really just sort of drift into the background. For some reason the movie keeps trying to sell us something about how great of a man Cochrane is and how great his masks are—even though he just smiles a lot and gives free tours and there are only three types of masks. Slowly but surely, though, we learn that the town is populated only by robots and that the masks, when combined with watching a subliminal message in the commercial, turn children into mounds of bugs, snakes, and worms. Cochrane, the villain all along (I never would of guessed), explains how all of his technology works just by pointing to a huge rock monolith and shouting, “Stonehenge!” His plan involves using the masks and the commercials to “bring back the real spirit of Halloween” which apparently, in “ancient times” (the times of Stonehenge, apparently), involved child sacrifices—Willy Wonka Cochrane is not. So, Dan and Ellie are taken prisoner, Dan escapes and frees Ellie, and the two of them blow up the factory and escape—only for Ellie to be revealed as one of the robots, who Dan kills. This sets it up for a cliffhanger ending which should be resolved in…
Oh, wait. Halloween IV went back to that whole “Michael Myers” thing. Dang.
So, Halloween III—what’s the real story? Is it terrible? Hell no. Would you recommend it? Well, only to people who don’t go in looking for Michael Myers. Is it good? Well…when handed the scepter of good-and-bad, I don’t judge in these cases. The jury is hung. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Still, my DVD (the “Special Edition”) had this weird green Matrix-like flashing. It was the same shade of green as the Silver Shamrock ads.
I wonder…aw, crap. My brother’s turning into a pile of snakes. Give me a second here. My brain hurts.
- Adam "Mudman" Bezecny
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