Review of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) by Mjs M — 24 Oct 2008

The infamous second Halloween sequel. I went into this knowing that it was going to be different from the rest of the series, I was completely ready to give this an objective viewing. First of all, I understand why Carpenter didn?t want to drag Michael Myers back into this thing. Halloween 2 probably didn?t need to happen, it did little except bring Michael Myers down to the level of all the other crappy rip-off masked killers of the time, granted it did it with more skill than most of the rest. If nothing else, Halloween 3 doesn?t feel anything like the other horror movies of the time, it doesn?t follow a formula, and it doesn?t have ?rules.?

It is also really, really, really weird. Really, an evil toymaker with a robot army who wants to kill a bunch of kid? What the hell is that? The movie has a lot of scenes that are just odd, the main threat to the hero are robot agents that kill people with their mare fingers. The man behind all this craziness has all the trappings of a James Bond villain, and his scheme is just ridiculous. The movie?s mix of witchcraft and technology simply does not make sense. Tom Atkins is also pretty strange for a horror protagonist of the era, he?s not a 19 year old survivor girl, he?s a fifty year old doctor, he looks a little old for all this shit. Then there?s that fucking jingle, anyone who?s seen the movie knows what I?m talking about. It was sort of a fun quirk the first one or two times they played it, but it shows up like 50 times, it ended up like nails on a chalkboard.

Really I think the problem here is that this is a quirky little episode of The Outer Limits or something being stretched into a feature length movie. The horror is completely reliant on gore, and bad special effects. A few of the images like the snake coming out of the mask were interesting, but the lack of any real suspense is a problem. This doesn?t really feel like a horror movie at all, more like a sci-fi thriller, almost an action movie except with more gore. The acting is not very good, but I guess it?s not as bad as the acting in the Jason movies. In fact, nothing here is as bad as the Jason movies, it maintained the visual/production standards of the first two films while going off on the wild tangent.

Halloween 3 is an oddity; the leftover remains of an idea which, from a marketing perspective, went horribly wrong. Calling this thing Halloween 3, was a stupid idea, but I doubt we?d still be talking about it if it was just called Season of the Witch, we also wouldn?t be talking much about it if it had been another random slasher sequel like Friday the 13th Part 3.