My Review of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Tonight's feature was, indeed, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

I'll be honest, I went into this one with fairly low expectations. I knew exactly two things about this movie before tonight: That it was completely unrelated to the plot of the first two movies, and that this was the first one not written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill. They do both return as producers, and Carpenter once more contributes his excellent score. With that in mind, I was quite pleasantly surprised by this movie. I have no idea why it was produced as a Halloween sequel, but it's not a bad movie on its own merits. Instead of a pure Slasher movie, this entry is a genuinely interesting (if very, very silly) Techno-Supernatural thriller, centered around a drunken, philandering Doctor Challis (Tom Atkins) and his somewhat distressingly young love interest Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) as they try to unravel the mystery of her father Harry's death just days before Halloween.

The movie begins with Harry (Al Berry, who played the ill-fated Dr. Gruber in the opening of Re-Animator!) running from a car full of men, clutching a pumpkin mask. He seeks refuge in a junkyard, only to be cornered and strangled by a silent, suited man. He manages to pin the man between two cars and make his escape, aided by the junkyard/gas station attendant (Essex Smith). Later that night, after he is brought ranting and raving into the hospital, another of the suited men shows up and murders him in his bed. Doctor Challis is (rightfully) disturbed by this, particularly after he watches the killer walk out to the parking lot, get into a car, and explode. It's a fairly strong opening.

I do want to mention that the opening credits sequence is very cool, and foreshadows the technothriller aspects of the plot, but it also includes a strobing light element at the end that is probably not smart to expose people to unprepared, so here's your warning.

Drunk doctors are in danger of becoming a theme in this franchise, because Doctor Challis has two character traits and that is one of them. The other is that he is super horny and will sexually harass and/or trade sexual favors with any number of his female coworkers, concurrently. It's not hard to see why he's divorced. Among his gal pals are a nurse, the coroner, and the ambiguously of-age Ellie (seriously, he doesn't ask how old she is until they have had sex several times, and while she implies that she is of legal age, she doesn't actually give him a straight answer. Their whole thing is kind of gross, very much not a Harold and Maude romance, more an old drunk taking advantage of a young woman's trauma response after the loss of her father).

We are introduced, through a serious of television and radio ads that play throughout the film, to Silver Shamrock, a local company that produces the most popular Halloween masks in the country, in exactly three styles, and not one more, which every kid in America is somehow totally fine with. Early on, in a bit that emphasizes that Challis is a loser who does not even have the respect of his children, they disdain his gift of cheap plastic masks, because their mother has already given them Silver Shamrock masks, which they proceed to put on and then stare into the television as it screams the Silver Shamrock jingle at them, counting down the days to Halloween. This advertisement is playing on every TV and radio in town, and presumably all across America, at all hours of the day and night, advertising not only the masks, but a Halloween Horrorthon with a special prize give-away on Halloween night.

​As Challis and Ellie seek clues to her father's death, she brings him to Harry's joke/toy shop, and we learn that he stocks the Silver Shamrock masks in his store. In fact, he had been on a run to pick up the latest order from the factory before he turned up at the junkyard, so the duo decide to take a trip to the factory themselves. They do not make any kind of plan before or during their considerable drive, and they drive all the way up to the factory gates before realizing this and deciding to go do that first. They head over to the town's combination gas station and motel, and rent a room posing as a married couple.

We meet a whole handful of people all at once, including Buddy Kupfer (Ralph Strait), his Winnebago-riding, all-American nuclear family, and Marge (Garn Stephens) who is also in town to pick up her order of masks, all staying at the same motel. There is also a helpful bum (played by Jonathan Terry from Return of the Living Dead) who directs Challis' attention to the security cameras, and presumably the curfew they are both in violation of, before meeting his end at the hands of yet another suited man. The little town of Santa Mira, where the Silver Shamrock factory is located, seems to be entirely peopled with Irish immigrants brought in to work at the factory, and the bum was one of the displaced prior inhabitants. Finally we are introduced to Mr. Cochran (Dan O'Herlihey, from Robocop) the distinguished owner of the Silver Shamrock company, and practical joke enthusiast.

After Marge is killed by the trademark tag on one of the Silver Shamrock masks (with some excellently disgusting practical effects), in what Cochran describes as a 'misfire,' Challis and Ellie decide that they must investigate the factory (after having a bunch of gross sweaty sex first). Posing as buyers picking up a lost order, they make their way inside, and find the Kupfer family waiting inside as well, apparently to meet Mr. Cochran and receive a guided tour of the factory, on account of Buddy being the highest-selling mask salesman in America. Some quick thinking gets them both invited to the tour as well, and they follow Cochran onto the production floor. At the end of the tour the Kupfer kid begs for a mask, and Cochran swaps out the one he's asking for with one bearing the trademark tag, explaining that the one he wanted had not yet been through "final processing". It very much sounds like he's bullshitting the kid, especially when Buddy starts asking questions and he has to make something up about volatile chemicals and such, but then they walk down the hall and there actually is a room marked Final Processing, which just begs the question; why not lie? Why not say it needed a final layer of sealant, or even just say the tag is part of the mask's value, and that's why he gave him another mask, instead of actually directing their attention to the clearly nefarious happenings in 'Final Processing'? I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does.

Eventually, Ellie finds evidence that Cochran was behind her father's death, but it is too late, a whole host of the silent, suited stranglers emerge from all around, and seize her and Challis both. Ellie is taken away somewhere separate from Challis, who is taken into Final Processing and given the big reveal, which is that Cochran stole part of Stonehenge somehow and brought it to California. He explains that he is doing some old-school Irish Samhain sacrifice, for the modern day, and demonstrates his plan on the Kupfer kid. When the kid wears his mask and watches a signal broadcast from the TV (the one being advertised constantly) his pumpkin mask is transformed into a real rotting gourd, and his head with it, bursting open and spilling forth snakes and insects which begin attacking the parents. It's a wonderful scene, with a very inventive effect, and it sets the stakes for Challis, because his kids are wearing those masks too. Cochran binds Challis to a chair and puts a mask on him, leaving him in front of a TV set to await his doom.

That would be a bummer, so Challis escapes right away, into the air ducts like a real 80's action hero, and to his credit, immediately tries to warn his ex-wife about the danger to their children. He's an unreliable, drunken liar so she doesn't hear him out, accusing him of jealousy and hanging up. Unable to save his kids that way, the doctor then tries to find Ellie and free her, as well as find a way to disrupt the broadcast. This leads him to a confrontation with Cochran that is bizarre and fantastic. There is a sacrificial circle for the (then) modern age, bridging the technological and the supernatural, and destroying Cochran's small army of what are by this point known to be weird clockwork/biotech/latex masked androids. Cochrane himself (or rather the fakest fake head in the history of fake heads) is lasered with beams of light projected by both the sacrificial circle and the Stonehenge stone, and it's ambiguous whether he is killed or if he has merely ascended to some higher form. He certainly doesn't seem surprised or unhappy at how things turn out for him.

Challis and Ellie make their escape from the factory, before Ellie reveals herself to be a robot doll thing too, although apparently a more sophisticated model than the others. I'm honestly not sure if she was meant to have been a robot all along, or if she was replaced while captive, because both are intelligible ways to read this movie, especially if you think Cochran was trying to manipulate Challis into coming to his town for some reason, a proposition made a little less of a stretch by how often Cochran mentions that he considers what he's doing a big practical joke, with Challis being one of its victims. In any case, they fight a grisly fight, and Ellie must be forcibly dismembered before she gives up the ghost. Challis proceeds into town, eventually running into the same junkyard as Harry did in the beginning of the film, with the station attendant even pointing out the similarity. He calls into the local broadcaster and tries to get them to stop the Silver Shamrock 9pm broadcast, and for a moment it seems that they aren't going to do it. Then the first channel goes off the air. The the second. There are only three channels because the past was terrible, and a long moment stretches out, the tension mounting, and then, it a truly ballsy ending, the broadcast goes out, and we close in on Challis' face as he realizes that every child in America, including his own, has just been sacrificed in a massive techno-druidic bloodletting. End credits.

It's a great ending that I think makes up for some of the very questionable choices made in the script, and I applaud Tommy Lee Wallace for going through with it. I actually enjoyed this movie a good deal, not least because it felt very much like it could have been adapted from the script for an X-Files episode. A lot of the best episodes featured a theme of ancient terrors adapting for the technological age, and that's exactly what's at the core of this film. It never reaches the heights of the first two films, and has some significant lows, but I did like this movie. I'm going to give it a 3.5/5 and reiterate that it is very strange that this was produced as a Halloween sequel instead of its own thing. They even lampshade that fact by having the original movie playing on TVs throughout the film, to establish it as a completely separate universe.

Oh, also Dick Warlock does do stunts for this one too, even though The Shape is nowhere to be seen.