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Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Rated: R
The first thing you should do is forget you know anything about this film and watch this teaser trailer (I'm sorry about the commercial but please watch it, it's only 45 seconds):
Now here is the theatrical release poster:
Again, pretending you know nothing about what's in store for you, how can these materials not be the most scary and exciting Halloween movie event ever broadcast tv or hung in a marquee?
I remember this film back in 1982, and the tv spots alone had us running around the sidewalks at dusk screaming like banshees, imagining how much of an incredible event Halloween III was going to be.
The movie starts off with a very promising title sequence made up of horizontal analog CRT tv lines of orange with light blue titles, while each line appeared or disappeared APPLE IIE style, that coincided with a synthesized musical cue, all the while this back drop sound is dark, one note droning. It's working us up and doing a fine job at it!
Once the movie starts, immediately there's an enormous sense of atmosphere as Dean Cundey's signature anamorphic squeezed night photography takes us over, and Carpenter and Howarth's music continues to swell. This movie looks dynamite!
After a few minutes of ominous set-up we meet Tom Atkins who plays a tough, hard drinking medial doctor. He's cool. He flirts with the nurses, his kids are idiots glued to the tv, and his wife hates him. He takes a late night call and goes back into the hospital.
At the hospital I guess some dude comes in shouting "they're going to kill us!". Hey, I don't wanna give away a bunch of plot, but for the next hour and 20 minutes nothing very exciting happens.
What does happen is that Dr. Atkins (we'll call him Dr. Atkins) meets a hot chick and they go incognito to find out what happened to her father, the shouting hospital dude Nevermind.
Anyway, they go to this desolate Irish town and get a motel room to investigate as a fake husband and wife. Guess what happens next? Yeah! He just met this gal and already he's banging her. I love this movie! It's so realistic and cool! Well, it's definitely cool because Bullwinkle Moose is on the case and she is smokin' hot in a Janet from Three's Company kind of way, except way, way hotter.
Let me skip a lot of stuff and just get right to it.
On one hand you have great camera work. Nothing moves or glides fancy, but the photography is beautiful. Also, some of the opticals are decent. I like colorful and/or well rendered opticals like lasers, and guess what? This movie has lasers, not once, not twice, but I do believe THREE TIMES! Guess what color? Well...you're gonna hafta just see the pictures I put in this review to find out!
So, what exactly is wrong with this movie? That's easy.
No, it's not that there is no Michael Myers.
That's not it.
It's because early on in the film, you get the impression that the bad guy has the same kind of menace as Myers, but you soon find out that this is not the case. The camera shows a tracking walking knees down to feet shot of the baddie, except it turns out that this dude is no more scarier than an insurance salesman. What's worse is that the main man bad guy isn't scary, either. He's just some old dude who looks like he belongs in Robocop as the head of OCP. Wait a minute, it is! It IS Dan O'Herily from OCP. Well, at least he's really Irish.
But back to what's good about this movie. It's an original idea. The story is so far fetched by the time you make it to 85 minutes that you may have to rewind a bit to make sure you heard the explanation correctly. At first I thought they were gonna blow it off with a line like "Do I really need a reason?" But no, soon after he gives the reason for the bad stuff that he the bad guy is doing and gonna do. I almost feel like the writing was improvised and at first the table was just like "eh, just have him say 'do I need a reason' and leave it at that". Goofy!
There was so much potential with this picture! Unfortunately, they decided to spend the entire length of the film focused on the stakeout aspect instead of bringing the destruction to suburbia where the viewer expected it to be. There could have been things going haywire in the streets, at doorsteps, everywhere, all at that time of evening when the sky is orange and the shadows of children are sillhouetted against it.
Which reminds me, kudos for the film actually taking the time to shoot a scene that marks the mood of itself. We get this image on the poster, too. It's a good look, and aside from horrible villains, the rest of the film does live up to the world that the poster creates.
Sadly the film does not live up to the teaser preview. We get no real witch that looks anything like that demon we saw. False advertising. BOO!
This movie could have been off the f*cking chain had it been written better.
Still though, for a sequel that decided to go its own way and attempt an anthology (which sadly never happened), it's kind of refreshing to let the Michael Myers character rest for a bit.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Rated: R
The first thing you should do is forget you know anything about this film and watch this teaser trailer (I'm sorry about the commercial but please watch it, it's only 45 seconds):
Now here is the theatrical release poster:
Again, pretending you know nothing about what's in store for you, how can these materials not be the most scary and exciting Halloween movie event ever broadcast tv or hung in a marquee?
I remember this film back in 1982, and the tv spots alone had us running around the sidewalks at dusk screaming like banshees, imagining how much of an incredible event Halloween III was going to be.
The movie starts off with a very promising title sequence made up of horizontal analog CRT tv lines of orange with light blue titles, while each line appeared or disappeared APPLE IIE style, that coincided with a synthesized musical cue, all the while this back drop sound is dark, one note droning. It's working us up and doing a fine job at it!
Once the movie starts, immediately there's an enormous sense of atmosphere as Dean Cundey's signature anamorphic squeezed night photography takes us over, and Carpenter and Howarth's music continues to swell. This movie looks dynamite!
After a few minutes of ominous set-up we meet Tom Atkins who plays a tough, hard drinking medial doctor. He's cool. He flirts with the nurses, his kids are idiots glued to the tv, and his wife hates him. He takes a late night call and goes back into the hospital.
At the hospital I guess some dude comes in shouting "they're going to kill us!". Hey, I don't wanna give away a bunch of plot, but for the next hour and 20 minutes nothing very exciting happens.
What does happen is that Dr. Atkins (we'll call him Dr. Atkins) meets a hot chick and they go incognito to find out what happened to her father, the shouting hospital dude Nevermind.
Anyway, they go to this desolate Irish town and get a motel room to investigate as a fake husband and wife. Guess what happens next? Yeah! He just met this gal and already he's banging her. I love this movie! It's so realistic and cool! Well, it's definitely cool because Bullwinkle Moose is on the case and she is smokin' hot in a Janet from Three's Company kind of way, except way, way hotter.
Let me skip a lot of stuff and just get right to it.
This movie is great and sucks at the exact same time.
On one hand you have great camera work. Nothing moves or glides fancy, but the photography is beautiful. Also, some of the opticals are decent. I like colorful and/or well rendered opticals like lasers, and guess what? This movie has lasers, not once, not twice, but I do believe THREE TIMES! Guess what color? Well...you're gonna hafta just see the pictures I put in this review to find out!
No, it's not that there is no Michael Myers.
That's not it.
It's because early on in the film, you get the impression that the bad guy has the same kind of menace as Myers, but you soon find out that this is not the case. The camera shows a tracking walking knees down to feet shot of the baddie, except it turns out that this dude is no more scarier than an insurance salesman. What's worse is that the main man bad guy isn't scary, either. He's just some old dude who looks like he belongs in Robocop as the head of OCP. Wait a minute, it is! It IS Dan O'Herily from OCP. Well, at least he's really Irish.
These are the bad guys. Terrifying, right?
Halloween III has moments, but I felt disappointed that the only scares were false alarms. Carpenter's usual jump scare noises that sound like a robotic bell on full volume do work to distract you from not being frightened, but it soon becomes an old trick. As if seeing the edge of a business blazer shoulder come into foreground frame is scary. I don't think so.But back to what's good about this movie. It's an original idea. The story is so far fetched by the time you make it to 85 minutes that you may have to rewind a bit to make sure you heard the explanation correctly. At first I thought they were gonna blow it off with a line like "Do I really need a reason?" But no, soon after he gives the reason for the bad stuff that he the bad guy is doing and gonna do. I almost feel like the writing was improvised and at first the table was just like "eh, just have him say 'do I need a reason' and leave it at that". Goofy!
There was so much potential with this picture! Unfortunately, they decided to spend the entire length of the film focused on the stakeout aspect instead of bringing the destruction to suburbia where the viewer expected it to be. There could have been things going haywire in the streets, at doorsteps, everywhere, all at that time of evening when the sky is orange and the shadows of children are sillhouetted against it.
Sadly the film does not live up to the teaser preview. We get no real witch that looks anything like that demon we saw. False advertising. BOO!
This movie could have been off the f*cking chain had it been written better.
Still though, for a sequel that decided to go its own way and attempt an anthology (which sadly never happened), it's kind of refreshing to let the Michael Myers character rest for a bit.