So. The infamous Halloween III: Season of the Witch, AKA "The one without Michael Myers." Yes, I was aware of what H3 was, but I decided to watch it anyway. Over the years, I've heard a lot of things about this movie, with the most optimistic being, "It's not one of the worst movies ever made. If you know the story behind it, it won't make you all that mad." Quite the endorsement. The story behind Halloween III, just in case you were not in the know, explains why it makes the jaw-dropping-in-retrospect choice to omit the main character of the series from an entire film. I've read a few different explanations for this, but it boils down to John Carpenter and Debra Hill (co-creators of the franchise) being tired of Michael, and the idea of continuing his story felt like it would be too ridiculous to take seriously, as the future sequels would prove. But the studio wanted to make more Halloweens, so Carpenter and Hill said that they would be involved in the project, but only if Halloween was transformed into an anthology title, where every film would have a different subject. It's actually a pretty amazing idea, if they had gotten the talent to back it up. Can you imagine a successful Halloween anthology franchise, where up-and-coming horror directors could go nuts and get widespread exposure? Too bad they didn't go that route, eh?
Halloween III: Season of the Witch begins exactly as you think it would: with computerized graphics and a title screen that must have taken literally seconds to produce.
Looks like the entire budget was spent wow-ing the audience with the opening credits
Dr. Dan (Tom Atkins) goes to pick up his kids for the weekend from his nagging ex-wife, and he brought them a present: Halloween masks! Because children love being told by their parent what they're going to be for Halloween. It doesn't matter, though; mom had already gotten them the cool masks, proving once again that Dr. Dan is a terrible parent. Dr. Dan represses the instinct to punch everyone in the house and instead responds to a call from work. Apparently, Dr. Dan is the only doctor that works in his hospital, because he was brought in on a case of exhaustion. Some bum passed out while clutching a Halloween mask and muttering something about people out to get him. Shockingly, the paranoid guy was right. Somebody was after him, and once they killed him, they committed suicide.
The suicidal man, showcasing the average emotional range of these actors
How could a guy who "looks like a businessman" do such a thing? After all, people wearing suits are incapable of violence or evil. Dr. Dan decides to investigate, and sexually harasses/flirts with the assistant coroner until she will help him. What do we find out from the coroner lady? The suicidal businessman must have been pretty strong, since he tore his victim's skull apart. Meanwhile, Dr. Dan spends time drinking and watching the same Halloween commercial over and over again.
I'll be completely honest with you: that is what you take from this movie, more than anything else. I hate that song SO MUCH right now. Anyway. Luckily, Dr. Dan is saved from the torture of spending time with his awful chidren and nagging ex-wife when he runs into the murder victim's daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin). She also thinks there is something strange about her father's death and is determined to get to the bottom of things. Together, they leave town and go to Ellie's dad's failing toy store. There, Ellie finds her dad's appointment book and determines that his troubles began when he went to the Silver Shamrock factory, which makes these stupid Halloween masks that all the kids are wearing. Meanwhile, Dr. Dan is acting kind of pervy and creepy toward Ellie.
"Do you think your father would mind if I took that 'Free Mustache Rides' shirt?"
When they arrive at the factory, they take advantage of a very convenient case of mistaken identity to get a tour of the factory from the owner, Mr. Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy). Why would the owner of a company run a brief and detail-free tour? How can a mask company be tied into a murder plot? And how do killer robots and witchcraft come into play? And what does "Season of the Witch" refer to, anyway? Some of those questions --- but certainly not all --- will be answered (poorly) if you choose to watch Halloween III: Season of the Witch!
Still not convinced? I don't blame you
What can I say about the acting in Halloween III: Season of the Witch? Well, Dr. Dan probably says it best in the film's final scene: "STOP IT!!!"
Tom Atkins was pretty horrible in the lead role, taking a role that needed sympathy and heroism and filling it with creepiness and a complete lack of motivation. Dan O'Herlihy was a little better as the closest thing this movie has to a titular witch, but looking mediocre next to the rest of this cast is no big deal. Stacey Nelkin was also halfway decent, if you like vacant stares and 80s hair.
...and/or random lingerie appearances
Her part was pretty horribly written, but there was one scene that I just can't let go of. So, Ellie and Dr. Dan have finally succumbed to the complete lack of sexual tension between them, and had themselves some sexy time. In a post-coital embrace, Dr. Dan asks, "Wait. How old are you?" Her response is, "Relax. I'm older than I look." Just so everyone is clear, our hero had a sudden pang of conscience and worried that he had just committed statutory rape (very hero-like), and her response does absolutely nothing to clear the matter up. If Nelkin had delivered the line with an eyeroll or a rib-jab, I would have taken that to mean that she is over eighteen. Saying it in a breathy voice, however, makes her sound like a child prostitute: "As young as you want me to be." Gross.
The less said about Tommy Lee Wallace's direction and co-writing, the better. Let's just call it annoying and incompetent, and leave it at that. Well, I guess that's where we can leave the direction. The writing is pretty terrible. I'll have to come back to that.
"Ah, yes, the joy on a child's face when he sees the same damn thing over and over again..."
How gruesome can a movie about Halloween masks and seasons be? Actually, there are quite a few death scenes in Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I would argue that there are more kills in this film than in any other Halloween, if you count the killer robots as victims. Speaking of killer robots, did you know that normal humans can punch right through them? It's true. Hell, you can even decapitate them with little effort, provided the robot has the form of an elderly woman. Halloween III also has some fairly unusual deaths in it. My favorite, by far, is the laser-to-the-mouth kill. There are no lasers anywhere else in this film, but poking the wrong thing with a paperclip takes you from bored and frumpy...
Luke Skywalker has had enough of her crap
...to herpes-tacular in a matter of seconds!
Cold sores are disgusting
Halloween III is also one of the few horror movies I have seen where child murder is a large part of the story. I'm not talking about a Mystic River type of story, I'm talking about a movie where the villain's stated purpose is child murder on a large scale. What makes the child murder even more unusual is the form it takes. The masks that are so prominent in the film kill the kids. They go from having a headache...
...to spontaneously shooting out bugs and snakes out of their skull remnants.
Tommy needs a bath
On the one hand, holy crap that kid just died and his head turned into bugs and worms and shit! On the other hand, this is a movie that kills children? That's surprisingly dark, given the Silver Shamrock's 8-bit oompah soundtrack. Judge for yourself:
Oddly enough, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is not remembered for being oddly gruesome or having a darker tone than most other horror movies. It is remembered for being spectacularly bad. Why? Maybe because this horrible, wretched song is replayed at least fifteen times in the damn film. Maybe it's the lack of Michael Myers. Or possibly the shitty acting. Or maybe because the public reacted poorly to child murder.
Nah. These punks are asking for it.
I'm going to place the blame squarely on the writing. Well, the writing, and the Silver Shamrock song. How bad is the writing? The entire premise of this film is based on the idea that all children want to wear the same nasty-ass, petroleum-smelling Halloween masks. Remember that time in elementary school where you decided to dress up as exactly the same thing as your best friend? No? That's because it doesn't happen. The Jack-O-Lantern mask is the last refuge of the poor kid in class that doesn't take baths. In that video above, most of the kids aren't even dressing in costume for Halloween --- they're just wearing their masks. I love the fact that some of the pumpkin mask owners have added snazzy flair, like a witch hat or a Revolutionary War-era hat. Of course, this plot also ignores logic. I'm not going to bother dismissing the Stonehenge angle, because that was handled in such a matter of fact manner that I nearly wet myself. I'm not going to touch upon the magic phone number that a civilian can dial to get multiple TV channels to not air a specific commercial. No, I'm talking about the notion that a company that specializes in cheap seasonal masks would A) have television commercials B) have television commercials on nearly every channel C) update their commercials on a daily basis and D) hire vans with speakers to drive around neighborhoods, telling kids to go watch TV on Halloween. Any one of those ideas at the core of a horror movie would make the film laughable, but when you combine them into one movie, the stupidity reaches such giant proportions that your brain starts to shut down.
Oh, I get it. TV rots your brain.
And that's the worst thing about Halloween III: Season of the Witch. There is simply too much stupidity in this film, so your brain becomes numb in an effort to keep from oozing out of your ears. If the film was halfway competent, this would be howlingly funny, but it's just too much of a bad thing.
Oh, suck it up. YOU read the script. YOU know.
But does Halloween III: Season of the Witch truly deserve its place among the worst movies of all time? I don't think so. It's definitely bad, but there are worse movies, and there are movies in this franchise that I've hated more. I think the notoriety surrounding this film is due entirely to it being the sole Michael Myers-less entry in this franchise. If it was just called "Season of the Witch," it would be a bad movie, perhaps even a forgotten movie, but it wouldn't be notorious. There are actually some elements here that I genuinely like. I really liked the villain's motive, and I liked that he scoffed at needing a reason to do terrible things. I liked that this movie took on the (fairly) taboo task of killing children in the story, and I was impressed with the implications of the ending. Yes, it's a pretty amateurish effort and deserves to be mocked by all that see it, but there are some core elements here that could ("could" being the operative word) make for a truly frightening horror movie. As a legit film, Halloween III receives a fairly generous:
However, for the truly bold and sarcastic, Halloween III: Season of the Witch has enough pleasure and pain to make Pinhead happy. I recommend jaded friends, Rifftrax, and/or a large bottle of rum. Because scotch should be enjoyed. Lefty Gold score of...
I considered waiting until Valentine's Day to review this one, but something in my gut told me I should check it out for my Month of Horror Reviews. And if I was a character in this movie, my guts would then be pulled out by a pickaxe.
If absolutely nothing else, this movie gets started quickly. The back story is presented with a series of newspaper headlines and voice-overs. Tom Hanniger (Jensen Ackles), whose father owns Hanniger Mines, where he works, forgot to "bleed the line" before leaving work one Valentine's Day. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you because the movie chooses not to bother; it basically means that he failed to vent the natural gas out of the mine, which means that a dangerous amount of gas built up. The thing about natural gas is that it likes to go boom. Boom it went, the mine had a cave-in, and six miners were trapped for days. Only one man, Harry Warden, was rescued; the rest were found with pickaxe wounds in their heads. Harry, who was discovered comatose, was sent to a hospital to recover (or not) and stand trial (or not). I mean, maybe the axe wounds were self-inflicted, like with Elliott Smith. Anyway, Tom was responsible for a cave-in, but also got the blame from locals for the work of Harry because the locals were irrational.
Fast forward one year, and it's Valentine's Day once again. After being comatose for a year, Harry Warden awakes, feeling refreshed and apparently not suffering at all from muscle atrophy. He proceeds to kill everyone he encounters in the hospital, cutting some in half and removing the heart from one victim. Because he's a sweetheart, he places the heart in a heart-shaped box of chocolates and draws hearts on the hospital walls in blood. Aww! Meanwhile, Tom and his girlfriend, Sarah (Jaime King), decide to attend a kegger at the mine shaft where the cave-in occurred. It's not like the mine is abandoned or anything; it's just closed for the night. So, I guess kids are stupid. Tom is understandably uncomfortable and makes an excuse to take an extra couple of minutes before entering; Sarah enters with Axel (Kerr Smith) and Irene (Betsy Rue). In the mine shaft, the newcomers find a bunch of dead bodies and Harry Warden, dressed in full-on mining gear and carrying a bloody pickaxe. These three manage to escape, but Harry chases them; Tom happens to be entering the mine as his three friends are skedaddling, so he was unprepared for Harry to show up and attack him. Tom survives, but his friends drive away to safety and he is forced to run deeper into the mine to avoid Harry. Just when it looks like Harry will kill Tom, though, Sheriff Burke (Tom Atkins) arrives to shoot Harry and save Tom. Harry didn't die, but he scampered into the mine and was presumably trapped in another cave-in.
Not a bad movie, right? Well, that's just the first fifteen minutes. That's how the entire movie goes, though; it feels very compressed, like they're trying to fit fifteen gallons of plot into a five gallon movie. Well, fast forward (again) and it's Valentine's Day (again) ten years later. Remarkably, the characters haven't aged much; Axel grew a beard, Tom stopped wearing a baseball hat, and Sarah took her hair out of a ponytail. Basically, Tom's dad has died recently and Tom returns to Harmony to sign some paperwork that will finalize his sale of the mine. That's right, this is a horror movie that takes place in Harmony. I don't have a problem with optimistically titled horror movie towns (after all, who would want to live in Depression Village or Darkness Falls?), but it is a pretty tired convention. Anyway, Tom's going to sell the mine (because he hates it, with good reason), and that upsets the townsfolk because the mine is the town's chief employer. Tom's been out of town ever since the last Valentine's Day "incident," so he is mildly surprised to find that Sarah and Axel are now Mr. and Mrs. Axel, and that Axel is now the sheriff. Axel's not a particularly good guy, though. Aside from making some completely arbitrary decisions about who should leave town (a la Brian Dennehy in First Blood), he has been cheating on his wife with a younger woman (Megan Boone) and --- oopsie! --- just found out that he got his mistress pregnant. I'm sure you will be shocked to learn that, after a ten year gap, Harry Warden returns and picks up where he left off --- killing people with a pickaxe, dressed in full mining gear. But...didn't Harry die ten years ago? And...what has Tom been doing all this time? And...isn't Axel acting awfully suspicious? Repeat those questions in turn every few minutes for another hour and half, and you've got a pretty good picture of how this movie works.
Let's start with some positive comments. Many people died in this movie, which is usually a good thing for a slasher film. I counted a total of twenty-seven kills in the extended prologue, but only three of those were on-camera. However, one of those was my favorite kill in the movie --- I have to give props to the awesome shovel-to-the-face death. It made me giggle. The rest of the movie has nine more kills, which is still a respectable number. The best of those involved a little person getting a pickaxe uppercut and ending up hanging from the ceiling. The gore is pretty solid, too. This movie also has a lot (a lot) of nudity, but it's not what you think. Instead of being three or four random naughty teens, it is one extended sequence with one actress. Poor Betsy Rue spent ten minutes completely nude and completely visible as her character had sex, got in a fight, ran for her life, hid under a bed, got murdered, played a naked corpse, and then had the sex replayed from a video camera by the police. Normally, horror movie nudity makes me offer up double high fives, but this was just so very, very much. And yes, she's kind of funny looking. Still, in terms of sex and violence, this movie definitely delivered.
But then there's everything else. The plot doesn't really work. They figure out that Harry Warden has been dead for ten years, so the new killer is just a copycat. The only two characters that would make any sense as the killer both have several scenes that make them illogical suspects, but logic doesn't get in the way of one of them turning out to be the killer anyway. SPOILER ALERT: Okay, so Tom ends up being the killer, unbeknownst to him. He has mental problems that give him a split personality (or something) that assumes the identity of Harry Warden. Or maybe he's possessed by Harry Warden. Whatever. But he has drugs for his mental problems, and he can be seen taking the drugs, oftentimes just before a murder occurs. So...his anti-psychotic pills help him murder people? Maybe he needs to get his prescription adjusted. And, with Tom as the villain, that means that Axel is the hero. So we're supposed to root for the adulterous jerk cop that is jealous and overprotective of the wife he doesn't touch? I think I'll pass. And you know how the killer reveals himself? By being sloppy. You know the old how-did-you-know-such-and-such, you-told-me-blah-blah, no-I-didn't exchange that has been done to death in horror and suspense movies? Yeah, it's done worse here.
The acting is not particularly good, but it's not terrible. Jensen Ackles has some pretty good moments when he's trying to be charming, but he falls short in the key dramatic scenes. Kerr Smith needs to stop acting. Seriously. His presence makes any film automatically a B-movie. Jamie King is okay, I guess, as the heroine, but I got tired of her scared voice after only a few minutes; she sounded legitimately frightened, which is good, but it's the sort of frightened where you wish someone would give her the 1950s snap-out-of-it slap to the face. Edi Gathegi was decent in his small role. Betsy Rue was, um, very naked and apparently comfortable with her body image, so good for her. I liked seeing some veteran actors in supporting roles, including Kevin Tighe (owner of the Double Deuce!), who spent his last scene using a voice that was supposed to indicate drunkenness, but instead just sounded like Ronald Reagan. Director Patrick Lussier did a good job filming the violence and gore in this movie and I can tell, even from my standard-definition viewing of the film, that he threw in a lot of special effects for the 3-D version (this movie is also referred to as My Bloody Valentine 3-D). I particularly liked a scene with the final confrontation with the killer, where he had the killer (whose identity was now known) replaced for a few frames with an image of Harry Warden. It's too bad that Lussier does such a poor job with his actors.
I wanted to like this movie, but the plot was just way too convoluted. It's supposed to have a twist, or at least a mystery, but there is no suspense. So you know that the mystery is going to be revealed, and you're waiting for it, and then it turns out to be even more ridiculous that the rest of the film. You know what would have been a better movie? If they had stretched out the first fifteen minutes into the entire film. There's no mystery, sure, so it's just a standard slasher pic, but this movie is not art, so who cares? And then we would have gotten to actually see Harry Warden at work, which would have been pretty sweet because I still can't figure out how he cut people in the hospital, after he awoke from his coma. That, I would have enjoyed. This? Not so much.
