Review #86: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #3: Halloween III: Season of the Witch

I thought I had watched this movie before; I distinctly remember putting it on some time in the last couple years while playing a game on my Switch. I must not have paid any attention, though, because I remembered literally nothing after the first five minutes.

Guys... this movie wasn't terrible. I mean, it was- hang on, put your pitchforks away, let me finish- it had a lot of things wrong with it. But I can't deny that it had the bones of a good story in there. An evil corporation steals an ancient druidic standing stone, grinds it up, and uses it to process a bunch of Halloween masks as part of a pagan ritual to sacrifice children to the god of the harvest. That alone is actually kind of an awesome premise! There are two huuuuuge problems with the execution though: They used that premise in the wrong freaking franchise, and the movie takes a looooooooong time to get to the good parts.

The idea behind making this a part of the Halloween franchise is, also, not inherently bad. Whoever took over after the second film decided that, instead of being just a continuing story about this particular serial killer, they wanted the Halloween series to be a series about- get this- HALLOWEEN. So they planned to make a number of successive films, all following different Halloween-centric stories. (According to the IMDB trivia, the part in Halloween II where a kid is admitted to the ER due to having eaten candy with a razor blade in it was supposedly a progenitor to this idea, but who knows if that's accurate.) But when you've already got two wildly popular films about Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and Haddonfield Illinois, and then suddenly the sequel is about pumpkin masks and evil robots (?) it's understandable that it got bad reviews. Maybe if they had made it more clear in the title and/or advertising that this wasn't supposed to be connected to the previous films it might have done better- I have no idea- but I guess they DID call it "Season of the Witch" (which still makes no sense after having watched the film) so who knows.

In case I didn't make it clear before, this movie is pretty bonkers. The action scenes are all really bad (it starts off with someone dying after being hit by the slowest-moving car I've ever seen, and then someone else is killed by what looked like having his nose squeezed?) and the two leads get friendly extremely quickly (after having zero chemistry whatsoever). There was a laugh-out-loud moment in this one (when a woman randomly has a laser beam shoot into her mouth) that was just as abrupt and ridiculous as when the cop car explosively ran down a teen in the previous film.

It's unclear why the villain didn't just kill the protagonist instead of tying him up and making him wait until the Silver Shamrock drawing. It's unclear whether adults and/or people without masks were even affected by the commercial at all. It's unclear why the protagonist's actions sabotaged the villain's plan in the end. It's unclear why someone whose entire enterprise profits off of young children would be so enthusiastic about killing off all of the children in the world. There's a lot of little things in this story that just don't make sense; no matter how good of an idea it was based off of the whole story ended up as a big mess.

I would have been interested to see what other stories could have come from this series if they'd stuck with this idea, but unfortunately people wanted more of Pure Evil(TM) Michael Myers so that's what they got.

This movie was better than I expected but still not very good.

Overall Rating: 5/10 More Days 'Til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween

Alternate Title: Halloween III: Michael Myers Is Dead So Here's A Jingle and Some Masks