Other Reviews in this Holiday Tradition.
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Writer: Tommy Lee Wallace
Cast: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy
Runtime: 98 mins.
1982
The opening sequence of Tommy Lee Wallace's Halloween III is auspicious enough. A bedraggled man flees from unknown pursuers into a junkyard. His peril is punctuated by a barbed synthetic score composed by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter himself. (The score, one of the finest aspects of the film, is the only creative contribution of series progenitor Carpenter.) Then the first death happens. A besuited villain gets crushed by a slow rolling car; his body goes herkyjerk for a second, then limp. It's an embarrassingly awkward moment, foreshadowing many more fun special effects to come that are framed in such a way as to suck that fun right out.
To be fair, subsequent plot developments recontextualize the stiltedness of that death, but not in a way that improves things.
You see, the fleeing man's attending doctor and attending daughter can't shake the sense that something is very wrong after he gets his skull crushed while sedated in a hospital bed. They team up to navigate a hapless concoction of a plot that more or less goes as follows... in an Irish company town (?) there exists the Silver Shamrock factory, a producer of children's Halloween masks. Head of company Conal Cochran has made it his ghoul* to sell as many masks as possible, which are hugely popular despite being offered in only three varieties: Pumpkin, Skeleton, and Witch (??). The twist is, these masks are equipped with an electronic chip (???) that shoots lasers into children's heads (????) when triggered by a special Halloween night advertisement that apparently kids are really excited about watching (?????). This laser beam turns the maskwearer's insides into poisonous snakes and bugs (??????). Conal has accomplished this by stealing one of the Stonehenge stones (???????) and using its power to bolster ancient druidic and planetary alignment energies (????????). He does all this with the help of a small army of human-passing automatons, which he just sort of had already (?????????).
*This was actually a typo but it seemed fitting.
You'll notice a conspicuous absence of Michael Myers, who we give up hope on when the film starts showing clips of the original Halloween on TV. Halloween III is no longer about a guy in a mask; it's about a guy making masks. This makes Halloween III the odd one out of the franchise. Producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill decided they weren't interested in revisiting the story of Myers, who probably died at the end of Halloween II for all I can remember. The concept was to pivot the Halloween franchise into an annual anthology of otherwise unconnected stories drawing from Halloween iconography. I think this is a neat idea, a way to abstract the brand while staving off the tiresomeness of endless sequels following the same beats. Unfortunately, the first step of this experiment was a resounding failure, and the spark of a cool idea sputtered out.
You can chalk much of this up to writing problems. The director rewrote a Nigel Kneale script that got meddled with until the writer refused to attach his name to it. The story suffers from wheel spinning and loose ends, a jarringly senseless blend of sci-fi and fantasy ideas, and an entirely unmotivated villain. Why are you doing this? the hero asks, to which the villain basically responds Why not? He then tosses off something about pranks being fun to play on children, before launching into a monologue about druidic sacrifice that painfully evokes all of the worst writing habits of Halloween II.
All of this is couched within an onslaught of anti-Irish racism, which I would call lazy and hackneyed if it weren't so bizarrely anachronistic. A great deal of Halloween III feels lazy. There are three (3) unrelated but identical jump scares that happen in the same parking lot. The editing actively fails at hiding stunts that nobody bothered to do. And the climax of the entire film involves dumping a cardboard box of chintzy buttons off a balcony. The one aspect of the film meticulous enough to be called well-crafted is Dean Cundey's cinematography, which features a nice sense of space and an exploration of all sorts of differently lit environments.
So it isn't a slasher movie, it's not sci-fi, it isn't really horror, and it probably doesn't count as action. This sort of genre mélange works in the hands of someone as talented as, say, John Carpenter, who accomplishes such a thing in his 1987 film Prince of Darkness. No such luck for Tommy Lee Wallace. I am impressed by the ballsy impulse to move away from the series' bread and butter, but each time I was about to have a positive feeling about the film, I was interrupted by a truly despicable commercial for the aforementioned Silver Shamrock company. This commercial blares at us throughout the entire runtime, "[Number] More Days Till Halloween / Halloween / Halloween / [Number] More Days Till Halloween / Silver Shamrock" set to a most irritating singsong version of "London Bridges." This is almost upsetting enough to work as vicious satire, but the film's habit of making strong choices for weak reasons tends to cancel out anything meaningful it could have built towards.
1.5 / 5 BLOBS
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