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Moving
the action away from Haddonfield, Illinois, the tale for HALLOWEEN
III: THE SEASON OF THE WITCH arises in the sleepy
town of Santa Mira, California where two outsiders discover a new
All Hallows evil.
The
mysterious Silver Shamrock company inundates television broadcasts
with its redundant-yet-hypnotic commercials for their new line of
Halloween masks. As the jingle counts down to Halloween, kids everywhere
clamor for these masks.
Late
one night, Harry Grimbridge runs in panic through the town, clutching
a mask in his fist, screaming "They're going to kill us!"
No, it's not Michael Myers' latex alter-ego disguise in his hand,
but an orange jack o' lantern mask — the heavily advertised
handiwork of Silver Shamrock.
Dr. Dan Challis attempts to sedate the frantic man. Little does
Challis understand his patient has good reason to fear for his life,
as a corporate assassin infiltrates the hospital and crushes Harry's
skull.
Challis
adds up the series of strange events on this rainy night —
Harry's murder followed by the killer's self-immolation car-B-Q
in the parking lot — and suspects a darker and deadly conspiracy
is at work.
Ellie
Grimbridge provides further pieces of this murderous puzzle, informing
Challis that her father, Harry, had been investigating the mysterious
origins of the Shamrock masks before his murder.
Challis
and Ellie team up to discover who is pulling the strings behind
the corporate facade of Silver Shamrock, and travel to Santa Mira
under the guise of sales reps checking on an order of Halloween
masks.
The
twosome soon take their coupled identity literally as Ellie and
Challis hastily become lovers. But the romantic mood doesn't
last as another sales rep for Silver Shamrock is killed at the same
motel — the tag from a mask blasting her face apart with a
mutating laser beam. Stranger still when lab coat technicians
and a Shamrock company van arrive to remove the victim!
The
next day Challis and Ellie infiltrate a tour of the Shamrock factory,
led by none other than Conal Cochran himself. The duo certainly
smell a rat, and Ellie discovers her late father's car hidden in
a storehouse, guarded by more Shamrock goons.
That
night Ellie is kidnapped by Cochran's henchmen. Challis
tracks Ellie's abductors to the factory where he discovers
Cochran's lethal secret: Cochran has populated the factory and
city with automaton robots of his own design... just like the model
which killed Ellie's father days ago.
Challis is captured and treated to a tour of Cochran's covert operations
inside Silver Shamrock. The masks have been programmed with
a chip containing fragments of a magical monolith from Stonehenge.
On Halloween night, the Silver Shamrock TV commercial will activate
chips in children's masks, killing them all!
Challis
views a demonstration of Cochran's lethal plot on the family of
Shamrock's leading sales rep, Buddy Kupfer. The Kupfers' VIP
treatment by Cochran quickly turns them DOA, as the son's pumpkin
mask melts over his head, spilling out bugs and snakes in a wee
bit of Celtic black magic from the old country!
Cochran places a skull mask on Challis so that he may watch TV and
become a sacrificial victim himself. Naturally
Challis escapes, frees Ellie from her cell and sabotages the factory
by arranging his own "misfires" of the lethal laser tags
as he and Ellie escape the inferno.
Yet
their retreat is short-lived as Ellie suddenly attacks Challis in
their getaway car! Somehow Cochran transformed one of his
robots as a duplicate of Ellie, and now his automated assassin attempts
to stop Challis from warning the world.
In
a quick battle, Challis beheads the robotic Ellie and flees in panic
to the same lonely gas station where Harry Grimbridge was found
ranting days ago. Challis frantically dials the local TV stations
and begs them not to run Silver Shamrock's deadly commercial.
Does Challis succeed in time to save his own children and those
around the world?
Alas,
the final deadly trick of this Halloween may be too evil to defeat. |
The
success of HALLOWEEN II easily prompted its creators
to make a third film, but there was one tiny hitch: the sequel had
just killed off their iconic villain, Michael Myers.
Laurie
Strode escaped her brother's knife and fled to safety just before
Dr. Loomis sacrificed himself to ensure Michael's destruction in
a fiery cataclysm. HALLOWEEN II ended with
Michael's skull cooking inside The Shape mask to punctuate this
most final of finales. Creator John Carpenter was done telling
the bloody and suspenseful story of the Myers siblings.
Game
over. End of story. Now what?
Somewhere
within the mix of producers Debra Hill and John Carpenter along
with HALLOWEEN alumnus and now HALLOWEEN
III director Tommy Lee Wallace, a concept was developed
to make this third entry the springboard of a film anthology series.
The premise: create a new HALLOWEEN tale, perhaps
every year, and tell a different story each time. This
TWILIGHT ZONE approach got the filmmakers off the hook of continuing
the 'dead' Laurie/Michael storyline while perpetuating a successful
film franchise.
British
writer Nigel Kneale, creator of the long-running QUATERMASS series,
was commissioned to author an original HALLOWEEN III script. But when the screenplay was submitted to the filmmakers,
it was deemed too dark and cynical to continue the franchise's established
tone.
The
anecdotes never quite match on exactly how, when and why Nigel Kneale
withdrew from the project. Some versions imply the writer
was dropped in the film's rewriting stage, while others claim Kneale
sued to have his name removed from the film credits after seeing
a screening.
Regardless
of the details, a new script was redrafted by Wallace in an attempt
to adjust the tone and horror content more in line with the prior
HALLOWEEN films and production began.
Tommy
Lee Wallace and crew found their cinematic Santa Mira in the northern
California town of Loleta, where a milk processing plant doubled
as the infamous Silver Shamrock mask factory.
Lead
actors Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin and Dan O'Herlihy assembled with
returning HALLOWEEN I & II director of photography, Dean Cundey. Other alumni re-upping
were stunt coordinator Dick Warlock, who portrayed The Shape in II and would play of one Conal Cochran's robotic
assassins, and actress Nancy (Loomis) Kyes who was killed as Annie
in the 1978 original and returns as Linda, the ex-wife of Dan Challis.
Cinematographer
Dean Cundey gave HALLOWEEN III a similar look to
the previous films, but the wider canvas of this new story with
many different exterior locations made HALLOWEEN's
trademark claustrophobic terror impossible.
In
contrast, this was a tale of one villainous figure dispersing his
evil deed around the world to unseen victims — the exact opposite
of Michael Myers constantly narrowing in on very specific victims
we know and sympathize with as an audience. In HALLOWEEN
III, the horror was demonstrated but never fulfilled, and
the fear was theoretically abstract instead of gut-wrenchingly personal.
Cochran's
plan to restore ancient Celtic traditions to Halloween and plotting
to cause a worldwide sacrifice of children was a muddied motivation
for the villain. His corporate persona and plot-established
business history didn't match his witchcraft-practicing backstory
at all. Nor did giving actor Dan O'Herlihy patches of exposition
to spout in an ominous tone evoke any plausible sense of terror.
Wallace's
script was also an indirect homage to Don Siegel's 1956 thriller
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. While this sci-fi landmark is a
fine film to praise, borrowing plot points from it produced little
but a distracting influence on HALLOWEEN III that
only diffused the scare potential of its story even more.
Leading
up to HALLOWEEN III's release, its producers and
director faced another large obstacle in promoting the film.
The knife-wielding Shape had become the main attraction in HALLOWEEN's
fan base, and his absence in HALLOWEEN III was
a publicity void unsuccessfully filled by a silver-haired toymaker
and three generic Halloween masks.
The
III numeral implied to an audience eager for more
Michael Myers that the film franchise was continuing on, and neither
fans nor critics were pleased by the sudden change in storyline,
despite the filmmakers' best intentions to create an anthology series
of new HALLOWEEN tales.
HALLOWEEN
III received poor reviews by the industry and the viewing
public, and flickered out dismally at box offices. Even the
film's producers now agree: HALLOWEEN III unsuccessfully
set itself apart from the overall franchise, and its uninvolving
story kept horror fans at a disappointing distance from the terror
they had come to expect.
Only
the resurrection of Michael Myers would return the HALLOWEEN
film series to profitability and fans to the theaters again.
|
It's
debatable that HALLOWEEN III has the most troubled
and tarnished reputation in the entire film series.
Titling
the film III while telling an entirely unrelated
story to its predecessors clearly demonstrated a desire to cash
in on franchise popularity. Yet by stringing along fans for
a third helping only to have the figurative rug pulled out from
under their soda-sticky shoes, the audience couldn't avoid feeling
taken for granted when neither Michael Myers, Laurie Strode nor
Dr. Loomis appeared in the plot.
Whie none of those characters appeared in any advertising of this chapter,
the III in the title did enough of the misleading
damage to create audience backlash and resentment toward the producers
and studio upon its release.
This
cynical switcheroo on behalf of the film's creators and marketers
sank HALLOWEEN III's reputation and box office
fortunes alone. Moviegoers in general rejected the 'next'
entry in the supposed anthology of films as unexpected and unwanted,
regardless of what merits HALLOWEEN III had or
lacked on its own.
Since
the film broke off in a new direction and left any surviving characters
behind, it remains impossible to assess HALLOWEEN III's
legacy in the existing franchise storyline. HALLOWEEN
II purposely and — at the time — permanently
ended the threat of Michael Myers. His absence is both by
design and the basic handicap of HALLOWEEN III
as an installment of the eight-chapter series.
In
short, HALLOWEEN III's legacy after 25 years is
to be considered — even by Moustapha Akkad when he spoke on
the topic — not truly part of the HALLOWEEN
franchise that came before or continued on after it.
But
in the end, this self-inflicted omission may give HALLOWEEN
III its fairest shot to be assessed and appreciated on
its own merits. The perspective of time has afforded filmmakers
and fans to see the movie for what it is rather than what
it wasn't.
Today,
as much as SEASON OF THE WITCH is a suffix to the
title, the words on its own have become a common prefix
to it. On its own, a small but loyal number fans have come
to appreciate if not enjoy HALLOWEEN III without
figuring its franchise baggage into their opinions.
The
producers, director and audience seem to agree: if HALLOWEEN
III had been eliminated from the title, SEASON
OF THE WITCH would have avoided the instant and fatal backlash
it suffered upon release.
On
its own, Wallace's film is a serviceable but ineffective Halloween
tale of the '80s: a bit too enamored by its own gore trappings to
tell a emotionally shocking story. The plot's mix of old world
witchcraft delivered by mutating laser beams and TV advertising
never quite mesh to create palpable horror.
The
element of social satire attempting to make television a co-villain
falters as a plot point intended to support scares or story. HALLOWEEN
III fails expose the insidious infiltration of TV into
our lives (even in the '80s video era) since network programming
in itself causes no harm. Rather Cochran's plan embeds a technological
weapon into his final, fatal Halloween ad which renders television
a passive medium of distribution, not the source of evil itself.
Relentless marketing might have been a more suitable target for
horrific satire, but the plot gimmick is simply too obtuse and contrived
to drive that story point home.
It
would be educational to read author Nigel Kneale's original story
treatment or script to learn what he intended in his Celtic sacrifice
Halloween story. All we can judge is the expositional motivation
recited by Dan O'Herlihy as the irrational rationale behind his
Hallow's Eve plot to murder children around the world. Again,
his reverence for ancient, bloodthirsty gods doesn't fit at all
with the industry or image of a successful business tycoon.
Conal Cochran ends up neither a black magic pagan priest nor a ruthless
commercialized murderer since his character straddles both identities
half-heartedly at best. Then again, hearing that damned jingle
every three minutes could drive anyone to mass murder, right?!
Tommy
Lee Wallace's self-proclaimed homage to INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
really doesn't materialize successfully either. Don Siegel's
Cold War tale of paranoia and alien dehumanization bears absolutely
no resemblance to the plot of HALLOWEEN III.
Siegel's INVASION was, among other things, a nightmare about the
loss of one's own identity by outer space seeds turning humans into
pod people.
In
contrast, HALLOWEEN III's threat is a murderous
act inflicted on humans by a human, using a gimmick which simply
rots the heads of children wearing Cochran's masks. No loss
of personal identity ensues, just a gooey skull full of bugs and
snakes triggered by a computer chip.
In
the end, HALLOWEEN III has trouble succeeding even
outside the film series because the story tries to accomplish too
much thematically with too little content. The HALLOWEEN
anthology concept died a quick and lonely death in the wake of HALLOWEEN
III, as fans demanded the return of Michael Myers.
They
got it. |
