On "Halloween 3"

Here comes another of my dubiously constructed movie reviews. The other night, there was some notion of going to a local place where they occasionally screen movies on sixteen millimeter film. Having been a few times, I can say it's a lot of fun (the one time my ear drums were about destroyed from overly loud sound notwithstanding). This time, there was a lot of hype about it being a special evening on account of a partnership with Fangoria, so my friend and I opted to watch something at my place.

He volunteered the film "Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch". It was the one film in the Halloween series I had not seen that I wanted to (though I have now developed an interest in the other I haven't seen, Halloween: Resurrection). Of course I was delighted by the prospect, and so he and his wife came over that evening. It proved to be an enjoyable evening, if a longer one than I guessed it would be.

Halloween 3 is notable in that it attempted to break away from the story of Michael Myers and the Strode family that is told in the first two films and every one after it. The idea was to have a new Halloween story every year, but when the box office returns from the first such entry disappointed, they returned to Michael Myers. It's too bad, because those films diminished markedly in quality even if they made more money than the anthology idea would have.

Halloween 3 has an interesting premise, even if the plot is exceedingly shaky. An Irish Halloween mask magnate has a scheme to kill all the children in America using exploding masks. Why? That's a great question, and there are plenty more that don't begin to be answered in any satisfactory manner. In any case, his foils are a doctor and the daughter of a toy store owner killed by the magnate's robotic goons.

I enjoyed the movie fine, though the more thought I give it, the worse it holds up. I always like Tom Atkins, who plays the doctor. I also like Dan O'Herlihy, who plays the magnate and who also was the head of OCP in the first two Robocop movies. The female lead is really something too, and then there are some rather novel elements to the movie besides. I do recommend the film, but I caution you against either expecting or thinking too much.