Halloween I I I: Season of the Witch
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Tagline: The night no one comes home.
Released: 1982
Starring Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O’Herlihy, and Michael Currie
Directed and Written by Tommy Lee Wallace
Format: DVD
Distributed by Goodtimes
DVD Release Date: May 1, 2001
Features:
Widescreen Presentation (2.35:1)
Foreign Subtitles
Premise: Tom Atkins, who also starred in John Carpenter’s The Fog, uncovers a new kind of Halloween horror in this third entry in the successful series from producer-composer Carpenter (Escape from New York). Dr. Daniel Challis (Atkins) and Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) stumble onto a series of gruesome murders when her father, who sells Halloween novelties, is killed by an emotionless assassin. An Oscar nominee for The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Dan O’Herlihy is Conal Cochran, a demented toymaker who wants to return the holiday to its dark roots using his Silver Shamrock masks. His unspeakable scheme will unleash death and destruction across the country, unless Challis can stop him in time, in this nightmarish thriller from Tommy Lee Wallace, the director of Stephen King’s It.
Plot Breakdown (spoilers): Halloween III: Season of the Witch takes the Halloween franchise in a new direction, with the intent of creating an anthology based horror series set around the holiday.
On Saturday, October 23, shop owner Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry) is chased by mysterious figures wearing business suits. He collapses at a filling station clutching a Silver Shamrock jack-o’-lantern mask and is driven to the hospital by the filling station attendant (Essex Smith), all the while ranting, “They’re gonna kill us. All of us.” Grimbridge is placed under the care of Dr. Daniel “Dan” Challis (Tom Atkins). While Grimbridge is hospitalized, another man in a suit enters his room and pulls his skull apart, killing him immediately. The man then enters his vehicle, douses himself with gasoline and lights himself on fire, causing the car to explode.
Challis, together with Grimbridge’s daughter, Ellie, begins an investigation that leads them to the small town of Santa Mira, California, home of the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory. They learn from a hotel manager, Mr. Rafferty (Michael Currie), that the source of the town’s prosperity is Irishman Conal Cochran and his factory, and that the majority of the town’s population is made up of descendants of Irish immigrants. Challis learns that Ellie’s father had stayed at the same hotel. Other guests of the hotel included shop owners Marge Guttman (Garn Stephens) and the Kupfer family: Buddy (Ralph Strait), Betty (Jadeen Barbor) and their son “Little” Buddy (Bradley Schacter). All have business at the factory and eventually meet gruesome ends because of the Silver Shamrock masks.
A day after arriving in Santa Mira, Challis and Ellie tour the Silver Shamrock factory with the Kupfers and are alarmed to discover Grimbridge’s car in a storage building guarded by more men dressed in suits. They return to their hotel, but find they cannot contact anyone outside Santa Mira. Ellie is kidnapped by the men in suits from the factory, and in an attempt to locate her, Challis breaks into the factory. There he discovers that the men in suits are actually androids created by Cochran. Although Challis succeeds in neutralizing one of the androids (Dick Warlock), he is eventually captured by them, while Cochran reveals his plan to kill children on Halloween night. He explains that the Silver Shamrock trademark on the masks contain a computer chip embedded with a small fragment of a five ton sacrificial stone stolen from Stonehenge. When the Silver Shamrock television commercial airs on Halloween night, the chip will activate, causing the wearers’ heads to dissolve and spew insects and snakes. Cochran further explains that he is attempting to resurrect the more macabre aspects of the Celtic festival Samhain.
Challis escapes, and rescues someone he believes to be Ellie. They manage to destroy the factory and Cochran in the process. However, Challis finds that Cochran replaced Ellie with an android. After destroying it, Challis returns to the same filling station where Ellie’s father had come eight days earlier. Challis contacts the television stations and convinces all but one of the station managers to remove the commercial. The film ends with Challis screaming into the telephone, “Turn it off! Stop it! Stop it!” while the commercial runs uninterrupted.
The Good: Halloween III really is a good horror film. Usually, the chief complaint against it is that Michael Myers is absent from the story – giving it a tarnished reputation. Tommy Lee Wallace does a good job of directing here, with an original story to back it up. Atkins and O’Herlihy provide excellent performances, with solid acting from the rest of the cast. The effects are also acceptable, even with the androids, whose mechanics could have come across as phony. Little Buddy’s “death by mask” is also disturbing and kudos need to be given to Wallace for having a child be a victim, something that is primarily unheard of in today’s films. This film would have fared better if it had dropped the Halloween III title and had just gone with Season of the Witch.
The Bad: While this film is original, it could have been about 15 minutes shorter. There are plenty of filler scenes here that slows down the pacing. Other than some pacing issues, the film does well standing on its own.
Goodtimes DVD release has the bare minimum of features, with only the subtitles available as a bonus – a very disappointing edition.
Final Comments: A really good film, hampered by a bad reputation because of its creative direction. The Goodtimes DVD release is the smallest of efforts.
Grade: B+ (film) | D (DVD release)
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