![]() What they find is a very different type of horror film from Halloween I and II. Season of the Witch has grown in popularity over the years as fans have healed from the initial sting and gave the film a second chance. But yes, as a pure sequel to Halloween – Season of the Witch blows. On many levels, the films kinda play like an eerie trilogy of haunting ghost stories, filled with monsters, mad men and vengeful ghouls. But, to be frank, people need to lighten up about this third entry because Season of the Witch is actually a pretty terrific little midnight movie, in keeping with John Carpenter's other chillers of the era, specifically The Fog and The Thing. Pay no mind that it was always the intention to transform Halloween into an anthology series – an idea that still seems rich with potential. And a great many fans are still pissed about that to this very day. Too bad she plays her last scene without a head.Was it a cheat that Halloween III skipped out on more Michael Myers mayhem? Well, it certainly was annoying that the advertising didn't let audiences know that little fact in the teasers and trailers. She has a kind of rapt, yet humorous, attention that I thought was really fetching. But watch her, too, in the reaction shots: When she's not talking, she's listening. She has one of those rich voices that makes you wish she had more to say and in a better role. The one saving grace in "Halloween III" is Stacey Nelkin, who plays the heroine. These are all obligatory shots where the man grabs the woman's hand and yanks her along, she of course being too dumb to run from danger on her own. (If you can figure out what Stonehenge has to do with this movie, you're smarter than anyone in it.) Next, there are lots of shots of the guy and girl running from O'Herlihy's henchmen. It consists of a few TV monitors on high-tech bookshelves and a papier-mache mock-up of one of the stones from Stonehenge. The funny part is that the underground lab is so cheesy. He's got an obligatory underground mad scientist laboratory, and we know the approach by heart from all the James Bond movies: White-coated technicians scurry around with clipboards, while the boss arranges a demonstration of the weird method of killing that will soon be tried on our heroes. Then the demented toymaker takes them on a tour of his facility, while explaining his diabolical scheme. But the funniest reference comes when the hero and heroine break into O'Herlihy's factory and are captured. The friendly motel owner in the company town, for example, is dressed as a dead ringer for Henry Fonda in " On Golden Pond." The scene where the bugs and snakes crawl out of the crushed skull is a cross-reference, sort of, to "The Thing" - the last movie by John Carpenter, whose original " Halloween" was incomparably better than Parts II and III. Like a lot of horror movies in this age of self-conscious filmmaking, "Halloween III" is filled with references to other movies. The factory has the whole town bugged and under surveillance, and the factory's guards are androids who crush their victims' heads with their hands. She enlists the aid of a local doctor ( Tom Atkins), and they retrace her father's steps back to an ominous toy factory run by Dan O'Herlihy. ![]() Instead, the plot follows the young daughter ( Stacey Nelkin) of one of the victims, who ran a toy shop. ![]() ![]() In fact, the monster is forgotten, except for a lab technician who spends the whole movie sifting through his ashes. It begins at the end of " Halloween II," when the monster was burned up in the hospital parking lot, but it's not still another retread of the invincible monster. This is one of those Identikit movies, assembled out of familiar parts from other, better movies. A half-baked scheme like that feels right at home in "Halloween III," which is a low-rent thriller from the first frame.
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