Films: 1980s
(1982) Halloween III
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Release: 1982
In two preceding films - 1978's "Halloween," and 1981's "Halloween II" - Carpenter wrote a beginning, middle, and end to the story of The Shape.
Into the elemental force that was Michael Myers, Carpenter packed a heap of mythology and allegory. When his character burned to death in Hadddonfield's hospital, that was the end of the narrative.
But Paramount was cranking out Friday the 13th films at one per year by 1982. The slasher sequel was at a head of steam, and another October release date loomed. Against that backdrop, Carpenter devised a solution to his reluctance to return to Myers' tale: Halloween would become an anthology series. Each film would revolve around the holiday, telling a dark fable about the 31st of October.
When it came time to pick a director for "Halloweeen III," Carpenter turned to the editor and production designer from his first installment of the franchise: Tommy Lee Wallace. From Wallace's script came the Silver Shamrock novelty company, makers of particularly popular Halloween masks. Nestled in the hills of northern California, Silver Shamrock inundates the airwaves with endless commercials for its costumes, and prepares its young customers for a "big giveaway" on Halloween night.
But something is amiss at the Irish factory. A retailer appears out of those hills, clutching a pumpkin mask and pursued by gray-suited killers. When he is hunted down and murdered in his hospital bed, Dr. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) chases the well-dressed perpetrator into the parking lot - where he watches the silent assassin self-immolate in the driver's seat of a car.
From there, "Halloween III" is a mystery. Challis and the victim's daughter (Stacy Nelkin as Ellie Grimbridge), drive north to Santa Mira to find out what happened to the doomed father in the factory town that makes the masks. The answer is: witchcraft.
Santa Mira is the seat of the ancient Celtic Cochran clan, whose patriarch Conal (Dan O'Herlihy), has managed to abscond with a Stonehenge monolith. He's putting chips of the druid rock into the masks, and when the "big giveaway" goes off all those masks become the death shrouds of a million happy Halloweeners.
What Wallace has built is a ludicrous premise, but it echoes a certain 1950s paranoia found in another genre piece that shares Santa Mira as its setting: Don Siegel's 1956 "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." From the automaton gray-suits, to the conspiring town folk, "Halloween III" presents a world of marketing and menace that duplicates the domestic threat of the pod people in Siegel's Cold War epic. "Halloween III" doesn't set up its plot as elegantly - it's unclear exactly what Cochran hopes to accomplish by melting the skulls of American trick-or-treaters, other than some muttered half-explanations about planets aligning. But the essence holds true, "Halloween III" is about the giving over of our kids to corporate mind control. When the television tells us to be there, we time even our rituals around it.
In any case, answers aside, Carpenter pitches in with some effective synth lines, and lifts a few musical cues right out of "Halloween." Wallace throws in several on-TV appearances of the titular franchise films, and there's a general sense of homage to what's gone before in that respect.
But everything is slightly out of proportion in "Halloween III," and while fans of the surrounding installments point their fingers at the missing Michael Myers, Wallace's film is actually quite a bit more than a bait-and-switch on a title.
It never amounts to the clever science-fiction horror it wants to be, but there is something worthwhile and interesting happening inside those masks.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Halloween III, 1982
But the essence holds true, "Halloween III" is about the giving over of our kids to corporate mind control. When the television tells us to be there, we time even our rituals around it.
