The Halloween Films Ranked: #6 ‘Halloween III: Season of the Witch’ (1982)

#6 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

John Carpenter‘s last involvement with the Halloween franchise where he handed off direct creative reins to Tommy Lee Wallace, a friend since film school who had been working on his films since Dark Star. Replicating the Carpenter look, this errant, black sheep entry in the franchise ends up feeling most like Prince of Darkness, just not as well written but just about as creepy. It’s Carpenter-like without Carpenter’s stronger sense of narrative (though, he did write Halloween II…).

Halloween is approaching, and all the kids want a Silver Shamrock mask, one of three (a goblin, a pumpkin, and a witch), their annoying commercials plastering the airwaves, counting down to the holiday, and promising a big giveaway that night. Meanwhile, Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry) gets dragged into a hospital and seen by Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) before being murdered by a mysterious man in a suit who then kills himself in a ball of fire in the parking lot. Harry’s daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), shows up to identify the body and is also determined to figure out what happened to her father.

I think the largest issue with this film’s script is the first third setting everything up. When we get past it, when the investigation combining Dr. Challis and Ellie leaves the sleepy California town for…another sleepy California town where Silver Shamrock is based, everything that came before seems so unnecessary. There are literal plot mechanics there to set things up, the murder of Harry and Ellie’s determination to figure out what happened along with the mystery of why they can’t pull human body parts from the wreckage in the parking lot, but once the pair reach the little town of Santa Mira, it feels like the film is finally beginning, even though the first half hour wasn’t exactly absent any events. The reasons for Dr. Challis and Ellie being in the town end up feeling so unimportant to them actually being there because they’re pretty much totally forgotten in favor of the central mystery of what’s going on at the Silver Shamrock plant.

Silver Shamrock is run by Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), a kindly old Irish man with a perpetual smile who is happy to give the biggest seller of Silver Shamrock masks, Buddy (Ralph Strait), and his family a tour of the facilities (not worth the price of admission, if you ask me). But there’s a secret door and this mystery of what these little tags on the masks are for, a tag that accidentally kills another woman there to purchase more masks for her store.

How this mystery gets handled ends up feeling like the second major issue with the script. It’s too opaque for too long, dealing out too few details about the nature of the masks, their overall purpose, and their effect, saving it all for the final act of the film. So, what we essentially have is a normal looking factory in the middle of nowhere run by someone who seems nice but obviously is hiding something and a vague sense of threat around everything. Wallace ends up hanging a whole lot on that vague sense of threat and dread, using every cinematic tool he’d learned from Carpenter to ramp things up without actually revealing anything, stretching the feeling really thin. I think the comparison to Prince of Darkness becomes kind of obvious at this point.

The third act is where the film is both at its best and worst. The reveal of the actual threat and purpose of everything, including a stolen section of Stonehenge, is really quite fun and ramps up the strange sense of terror that the film had been hinting at for most of its running time. However, the mechanics of how Dr. Challis goes from prisoner to beating everyone make just this side of no sense and heavily require everyone being kind of stupid to let it happen. Stil, the ending where all may have been for naught is a fun moment.

So, is this some hidden masterpiece only maligned because it doesn’t have Michael Myers (all that much)? Not really. Does it have its own charms within the horror genre? For sure. Is it good? I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s far from worthless.

Originally published here