The Horrible Horror Vault: The one that's a slasher sequel without the slasher.

 

Title: Halloween 3: Season of the Witch

What Year?: 1983

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: For Crying Out Loud! (1/4)

 

As I write this, I’m looking ahead to Halloween, which has been my busiest time as a reviewer. It has also been the time I tend to end up looking at either starting new features or gearing up the ones that haven’t got off the ground. In the meantime, I ended up with something that I might have saved for later if I was in the habit of actually planning these things. It’s a very strange and fairly infamous entry in a famous franchise I have normally kept at a respectful distance. By my usual skewed standards, that made it of more interest than the more typical and popular ones. It was all the more appropriate to kick off yet another feature, dedicated to the horror genre. I present Halloween 3, a slasher sequel that tried to retire and replace its villain… and if you’ve seen any other entry in the franchise, you can already infer how well that went.

Our story begins with a gruesome attack that leaves the intended target mortally wounded. A rough and tumble doctor who will become our hero is called in to question the victim, who gives an unhelpful warning of an upcoming catastrophe. Meanwhile, Halloween is approaching, and the airwaves are saturated with ads from a manufacturer of Halloween masks called Silver Shamrock. The doc meets up with the daughter of the departed, who proves to be the owner of a shop selling the masks. This is enough of a connection to the Silver Shamrock headquarters, where they meet the charming old Irishman in charge. Soon, however, they uncover more deaths, apparently committed with a group of creepers who begin trailing them. It becomes apparent that these are not mere human attackers, but nearly indestructible android assassins who still bleed like their biomechanoid counterparts in the Alien franchise (which at this point is still just Alien…). They trace the killers to the factory, where they discover a plot to kill the company’s customers with boobytrapped masks that can only be triggered by convincing the kids to stand in front of a TV screen during a hyped-up Halloween broadcast. It’s up to our hero to save the day- but the bad guys have gotten the girl first!

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch was a 1982 horror/ science fiction film developed as a thematic sequel in the Halloween franchise, following the 1978 film and its direct 1981 continuation Halloween 2. The film was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, from a script and story originally developed by British sci fi/ horror veteran Nigel Kneale. John Carpenter (see Dark Star, The Thing, etc, etc) returned as producer, reportedly on the condition that the film would not feature Michael Myers, who was (spoiler) shown killed by Laurie Stroud at the end of the second film. Carpenter also received credit along with Alan Howarth for the film’s soundtrack. The new film starred Tom Atkins (see Night of the Creeps, Lethal Weapon, Creepshow, etc) as Dr. Challis and the late Daniel O’Herlihy (The Last Starfighter, Robocop 2) as the villain Cochran, with Stacey Nelkin as the love interest Ellie. Dick Warlock, the second of two actors to portray Michael Myers in the earlier films, appeared as one of the androids. The film was commercially successful, earning $14.4 million against a $2.5M budget. However, it was poorly received by critics and fans, and was considered a box office disappointment compared to the earlier films. The next franchise entry, The Return of Michael Myers, was released in 1988. A franchise reboot was released in 2018.

For my experiences, what really stands out in hindsight is that this was the only Halloween film I was really aware of when I was growing up. Just from the summary, it certainly seemed odd, but of course, for all I knew, it could have been “normal” for the franchise. By the early 2000s, I knew the basics of the franchise without taking any interest in it, I’m sure mainly because of my antipathy to slashers. I finally saw the first movie, either right before or actually after watching the reboot in the theater. My only other foray was to watch the original sequel, which I would have to give another look to comment on. The one thing I drew from all of this is that the first two movies were pretty much two halves of the same story. I was unsurprised to find ample evidence that Carpenter was trying to bail on the whole thing after Halloween 2. I still gave little if any thought to a review, until I trashed Sleepaway Camp just a little before the present review. I decided it was time for a rematch, so I decided to try this film in particular and see if it suited my purposes. I came in with modest optimism, and came out simply baffled.

Moving forward, already a lot further in than usual, what settled me on doing this review at all was the music. The centerpiece on this front is the absolutely maddening Silver Shamrock jingle, all the worse for actually being pretty catchy. If you can look past that, this is a true showcase of Carpenter’s perennially underrated talents. The music calls all the way back to Dark Star and ahead to They Live. Most intriguingly, the score has a lot in common with that of The Thing, which would have come out just a few months earlier. This strongly suggests either that Carpenter contributed more to that now-definitive film than he has gotten credit for, or that he had already learned something from working with the great Ennio Morricone. By the finale, however, it has long since become clear that Carpenter is still learning the ropes here, as numerous cues clearly based on The Thing equally clearly fall short of it. What was a masterpiece of minimalism from Morricone just sounds more cliched than it is here, which admittedly hasn’t been helped by Carpenter’s own influence on often inferior filmmakers.

That brings us to the story and characters, and here is where things really start to go downhill. O’Herlihy is the real star here, charming and menacing by turns. There’s a hypnotic dignity as he gives his Celtic account of the “real” meaning of Halloween. To more refined sensibilities then or now, it’s just a version of the blood libel, yet there is a pre-Christian authenticity that is not easily discounted, surely helped by the actor’s Irish heritage. By comparison, Atkins is just workmanlike, feeling so much like his character in Night of the Creeps that I honestly wrote parts of this review on the assumption that he’s supposed to be a cop. A non-trivial problem is that there’s really no good reason for him to be the one rooting out the plot if he’s not law enforcement. The real weak link is the love interest, whose lack of attraction or any interesting traits highlights the fact that there was no reason for the relationship to be anything but platonic. The belated high points come with the scenes of the TV studio. It’s a given that none of it makes sense or would work even by the movie’s half-logic (how many kids are really going to stay up till 9 on Halloween just to stare at a TV screen?), but there is a pointed allegory in play that seems to mock the moral guardians who took offense at Carpenter and his peers. (I can’t avoid mentioning Looker, which tried to cover similar ground a lot less effectively.) It all ends with a callback to The Thing that really works as Atkins continues to try to halt the scheme, with a desperation that easily overrides any common-sense analysis.

After all that, I still have to say a little about the androids. These are easily among the most sinister on record. It’s all the more disconcerting to see them really bleed a range of unwholesome fluids. In the process, it’s established that they can be killed or disabled, but they certainly take a lot of damage. Considered in cold blood, it’s really all quite silly, yet in the best early ‘80s horror tradition, it genuinely works in context. If there’s a “problem”, it is that we never get a sense of their motivations and mental life, which is made particularly acute for one that replaces a major character. For the most part, they seem to follow orders without complaint or further reflection, which makes them far more sinister than they would be if they were the kind of AI that might question, defy or outright kill their creator. Still, there’s not much here that hasn’t been done as well or better before, with an odd familiarity that belies the movie’s ambitions.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with one that’s brief and odd even here. A little ways in, the doctor is in a bar where a cartoon is playing on the TV. He asks the doctor to change the channel, and suddenly we do see Michael himself, in an ad for what’s introduced as “John Carpenter’s immortal classic” Halloween! Of course, it’s a huge “meta” moment that begs for overanalysis. Does this mean the present film is supposed to take place in “our” world where the previous films did not? Is this an alternate universe where the franchise is based on real events? If so, was Michael unkillable because he was really an android? What intrigues me is what it says about Carpenter’s career and creative trajectory. There was definitely an ego factor that emerged early on, whether or not Carpenter himself wanted or encouraged it, and this casual reference definitely reflects that, with talk that was awfully strong only four years after the first film. (So, is this already the future???) In my opinion, however, there is an element of irony and perhaps self-deprecation here. The core fact is that Carpenter has had many points where he could have rested on his laurels, either by retiring or settling into rehashes of his earlier work. Instead, virtually every one of his films has been followed by another that has been quite different, for better or worse. I absolutely take this passing in-joke as an early sign that this was what he wanted all along. He deserves even more credit for Halloween now than he did then, but he deserves all the more credit for moving beyond it.

In closing, I hope finally to be brief. If it seems like my rating is at odds with my own comments, it’s because my own feelings are conflicted. Even sight unseen, I have long wished that this film had had greater success, if only because it showed there was another way to do a franchise than conveniently resurrecting the villain/ monster as often as needed. I will further allow that it probably would have failed in that regardless of its actual quality; the 1980s slasher trend had already been set in its course by other minds. But the fact remains that it did fail from numerous flaws all its own. It might not be worse than other slasher sequels or even others in its franchise. For a film that set out to carve a whole new course for a franchise and a genre, however, it could and should have been better. With that, I for one am calling it a night.