Halloween III: Season of the Witch -
Our favorite William Shatner-masked villain or not, this is great horror, and like
They Live, it demonstrates the expertise of Carpenter (along with writers Kneale and Wallace) with stories about the dangers of consumerism. It's a week before October 31, and a company called Silver Shamrock is flooding the airwaves with hypnotic commercials for their top-of-the-line Halloween masks. Meanwhile, an old man flees some stone-faced, corporate-looking pursuers, doesn't exactly make it out unscathed, ends up in the hospital, and what does his doctor (Atkins) find in his effects? You guessed it: a mask. This leads him and the stranger's comely relative, Ellie (Nelkin), to Silver Shamrock's headquarters so they can stick it to their corporate overlords (and oddly enough, the Irish).
As Jack Burton in
Big Trouble in Little China and Nada in
They Live indicate, Carpenter productions excel at crafting and casting everyman leads who are thrust down rabbit holes, and Atkins' Dr. Challis is worthy of being mentioned alongside them. He is convincing as the only sane person in this world and in his frustrations with this responsibility. He has a worthy adversary in Dan O'Herlihy's Silver Shamrock CEO Conal Cochran, who masterfully personifies corporate insincerity and sleaze. Horror and not corporate intrigue is on this movie's mind first, though, i.e., the horrors of losing the ability to make decisions for yourself and of forced conformity. I'll probably never forget the music in that damned commercial, and what's more, there's an unsettling montage showing kids across America buying the masks and putting them on as if they had no choice. As for the Silver Shamrock employees, their uniform dress, hairstyles and complete lack of emotion might as well have inspired the agents in
The Matrix movies. If all of this makes the movie sound like
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite, I don't blame you, but it has enough of a unique, not to mention era-specific spin on these tropes that I never minded. The scares are thankfully tinged with the right amount of comic relief, especially in Ellie's understandable inability to resist one of cinema's great moustaches.
Back to that "Irish" bit: as the evil corporation's and its leader's name imply, they're all Irish, and even though it's explained later, you might wonder if the writers have something against them. There are also some noticeably listless moments here and there that come across like filler and that affect the pacing. I still had a blast and consider it a prime example of '80s horror and not just because it came out in that decade, if you will. In addition, this is hopefully no longer a concern, but its stigma of being the only movie in the franchise without Michael Myers should not be a stigma.
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