Halloween III: The Season of the Witch

I can appreciate what they tried to do with 1982's HALLOWEEN III: THE SEASON OF THE WITCH.  The franchise had suffered a minor setback with HALLOWEEN II, a decent but uninspired slasher that was an inferior knock off of the original, classic 1978 chiller.  Writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace, who had worked with John Carpenter on earlier films as an editor and art director, concocted an entirely new story that had nothing to do with the masked, knife wielding lunatic named Michael Meyers.  A fresh take is always welcomed, but this time the result was a total wash. HALLOWEEN III is a vile piece of refuse that, despite some novel elements, is less of a film than even the worst of the proper HALLOWEEN sequels.

The story involves a crazily nefarious plot: the murder of millions of children on Halloween. Uh huh.  The CEO of Shamrock Novelties, who creates Halloween masks that are quite popular with the young ones, is an old man named Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy).  He seems kindly enough.  His company drives the economy of a small town in California.  It is there that a physician (Tom Atkins) and an attractive young woman (Stacey Nelkin) investigate the death of her father, a local shopkeeper.   Not unrelated to this is said dastardly plot.

Should I spoil it for you? It's pretty disgusting. There is no mad slasher on the loose this time.  The villains are corporate heads and their army of reinforcements, and Wallace does make a few points worthy of a head nod or two.  Shamrock plays a series of television commercials inviting kids to wear their special masks in front of the T.V. on October 31st for a big surprise. In a scene straight out of a James Bond movie, our heroes have been trapped by Cochran, who demonstrates with a local family what this big surprise is.  It is ugly and disheartening.  Gross in the traditional sense, but also in the soullessness behind such a plot (and that someone would bother to create a story such as this).

Then you learn why Cochran would engineer such a ghoulish deed.  I threw my hands in the air in disbelief, even as a fourteen year old.  It's pretty lame.

The disbelief continued when I read in some magazine at the time that Wallace was proud that his film did not contain graphic violence.  I guess the decapitations at the beginning and end of the film don't count.  He does create some creepy atmosphere and throws in a reference or two to the older HALLOWEEN films, but otherwise this is an experiment best forgotten.  A real lost opportunity, and just a bad movie.