Spooktober II Review #25 - Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Halloween III:
Season of the Witch (1982)
Tommy Lee Wallace

"It's getting late. I could use a drink."

Four years after the original John Carpenter masterpiece, Halloween III, a film so bizarrely funny and charmingly incompetent that it's become a classic in its own right, was released. There are so many weird choices that Tommy Lee Wallace made with both the direction and the script that it feels a bit like a weird piece of outsider art, except that it has all the technical touches of actual filmmaking. It's such a curious creation, and one that I love.

Imagine going to the theater in 1982 ready for some more Michael Meyers hacking and slashing, but instead getting a weird story about an Irish toy manufacturer who wants to murder every child in America with magic Halloween masks. From what I understand, John Carpenter (who only acted as producer for the Halloween films after #1) wanted to transform the series into different spooky stories outside of the Michael Meyers-verse. This was their first and only attempt at that terrible idea, because audiences were pissed, and it was not nearly as successful as the previous installments.

But that's ok. Who cares about box office results? That's no arbiter of quality. But you now what is? Tom Atkins, and this is his magnum opus.

Let's start with him, in fact. The directorial choice to make him into a greasy drunk is easily the best part of the film. I think Tommy Lee Wallace wanted him to be a rugged, hard-drinkin' man's man, but he just comes off as a complete degenerate. And it's awesome.

Here's a non-exhaustive list of his degenerate drunk behavior in this film:

1. Shows up at his ex-wife's house to deliver some cheap dollar store masks to his children, who instantly hate them. His wife comments that he smells like booze, and he doesn't deny he was at the bar before coming over.
2. He goes to work drunk. He is a medical doctor in an Emergency Department.
3. While at work he spanks a nurse on her ass and jokes that she should come take a nap with him.
4. He sleeps while on his shift. When he wakes up, he appears to have a searing hangover.
5. After a mysterious patient comes into the hospital raving mad and is murdered by another mysterious man in a suit, Dr. Tom Atkins tries to stop the murderer who immolates himself in the parking lot. Dr. Atkins just watches him burn with a blank look on his face.
6. The following day, the mysterious patient's adult daughter, Ellie, comes to visit Dr. Tom at a bar. He is the only one there, and the chairs are all up on the tables. It is clearly morning. He is drinking beer and doing shots of whiskey.
7. When Ellie arrives at the bar she says, "One of the nurses said I could find you here."
8. They decide to take a drive out to the Silver Shamrock Corporation to find out what Ellie's father was doing there right before he died. Ellie says that it's not far away. Dr. Tom Atkins brings a six pack of Miller High Life roadies for the trip.
9. After arriving in the small town where Silver Shamrock is located, they check into a motel, and Dr. Atkins coyly suggests they stay in the same room. They've known each other for about three hours.
10. When Ellie wants to get right down to work and find out what happened to her father, Tom Atkins says, "It's getting late. I could use a drink." He's already had a couple eye-openers and a sixer of High Life on the road.
11. "A drink" to Dr. Atkins means an entire bottle of whiskey, that he drinks from a paper bag while walking down the streets of this small town. He's not an unkind drunk, however. He shares his bottle with a local hobo. The hobo looks more put together than Tom Atkins.
12. That night, reeking of booze, Tom Atkins and Ellie take part in easily the grossest consensual sex scene in film history. It starts with him munching on her nipple, if that's any indication of how bad it is.
13. During the course of their.....lovemaking, they hear a woman scream from next door at the motel. Tom Atkins decides that it's nothing, despite there being a clear mystery to this town. They keep having sex, presumably for hours.

Here's an appropriately loving tribute:

But there's something undeniably charming about all of this, and it's what keeps me coming back year after year for more Halloween III. If he were just a regular middle-aged hero, it would be boring. The fact that he's a total degenerate alcoholic, and that his drinking isn't even a driving part of the plot is so funny and weird. It's the kind of bizarre plot choice that a foreign amateur filmmaker like Y.K. Kim or John Rad would make. But it doesn't come off as fake or like Wallace was trying to force it to be funny. It's totally natural and hilarious.

Let's get into the non-boozy parts of the story. As I mentioned above in the Atkins degeneracy rundown, a mysterious man shows up at a hospital, ranting and raving, holding a Halloween mask in his hand. He is brutally murdered while in the hospital by a silent man in a suit:

It turns out the murdered man owned a toy store nearby and sold a lot of the Halloween masks that he was holding. They're masks from a company called Silver Shamrock, and despite being generic and terrible, are evidently Furby raised to the power of Tickle Me Elmo, so every kid is foaming at the mouth to get one. Maybe it's the annoyingly catchy jingle:

In the Halloween III universe, there's only one conglomerate that somehow cornered the market on Halloween masks, has clearly spent millions on daily national television advertisements, and gets independent vendors to travel to the factory to fill their own orders. Tom Atkins and Ellie cross paths with two of these salespeople at their motel. One of the salespeople notices that the Silver Shamrock logo has fallen off one of the masks and has what looks like a microchip on the back of it. Curious, she pokes the microchip with a bobby pin, and a blue laser shoots out and fries her face off. Something is clearly amiss with these masks.

Tom and Ellie visit the Silver Shamrock factory and begin to discover the horrible truth. It turns out that a group of Irish druids practicing modern witchcraft have stolen a piece of Stonehenge and are using tiny chunks of it to make the masks into something dangerous once activated by a television signal (or a bobby pin, I guess?). 

Confused as to how this works, or how they even got a piece of Stonehenge to a small town in California? Everyone is, but there's no explanation given. In fact, as the main villain Conal Cochran is detailing his dastardly plan, all he says is that it was a "piece of work" to get part of Stonehenge there.

Somewhere in this mess, Ellie is kidnapped by the Silver Shamrock people. As Tom goes looking for her, he's trapped and Cochran gives him a demonstration of their power so that he can see what will happen when kids across the country wear their masks at 9 pm Halloween night:

Before it was just a laser that fried a woman's face off, but now it's a signal that turns children's heads into bugs and snakes. Cochran's explanation for this plan is that it's the best practical joke in history. 

No, seriously. That's the only explanation given.

One thing that the movie never adequately explains is how the plan will work across timezones. The signal is going to air at 9 pm Pacific Time, which means that in New York and Boston and Miami, kids will have to stay up until Midnight (on a Sunday, mind you) to be affected. In the control room, there are clocks from every timezone, so the evildoers are cognizant that time is relative across the country, but that doesn't seem to throw a wrench into the works.

Naturally, Tom Atkins breaks free, and begins disrupting the plans. He attacks a guard, and discovers that he's actually an elaborate automaton built by Cochran. He rescues Ellie, rigs the control room to display the all-important signal, and dumps a bunch of Silver Shamrock tokens onto the automatons working the computers. This causes a bunch of lasers to fire off and kill the robots and Cochran.

Tom and Ellie flee the factory, and speed toward town to try and stop the broadcast. It's already 8:50 pm, so time is getting short. As they are driving, Ellie reveals herself to be one of Cochran's automatons and attacks Tom, causing him to wreck the car. Has she always been a robot? Did they somehow turn her into a robot in the couple of hours they had her imprisoned? Is this all a hallucination that he's having from hours of being without a drink? Who knows!

Luckily Tom Atkins has been in his fair share of car accidents, so he's not phased when the car plows into a tree. He quickly dispatches Ellie by knocking her head off with a solid knuckle sandwich, and runs to a nearby gas station to try and stop the broadcast.

By the film's internal clock, he's got two minutes to spare, but somehow reaches, presumably, the television czar. With his DT's raging, Tom convinces the powers that be to remove the broadcast in the best final scene ever:

Evidently the original ending was a fade to black as the screams of millions of children can be heard, but Wallace considered that too dark.

Also, how great that there's only three channels? I guess the druids didn't want to pay for all of the small-market UHF signals too. That's probably why this 4,000 year-old group decided to pull off this plot in 1982. If they waited for cable to get big, they'd go bankrupt trying to run ads on every possible station.


Ok, so is Halloween III the best horror movie ever? No, but that's ok. It's unintentionally funny, it's schlocky, it's nonsensical, and Tom Atkins is at his most Tom Atkins here. It's super entertaining, and there are lots of understated but hilarious details. Basically, it's the fucking best.

There are some reviewers who consider it to be a hidden masterpiece of anti-consumerist filmmaking, but that's probably not true. It's just a weird B-movie with a ton of memorable scenes and an amazing lead actor with a raging alcohol problem. Everyone's trying hard, and it's a successful light-hearted R-rated horror classic. 

Summary:

Sure it's a little goofy, but this is a movie I'm going to watch every single year. It's undeniably charming, draws you in with the booze soaked charisma of the lead character, and keeps you entertained with the absurd plot. If you've never seen it, now's the time. Crack a few High Life's at 9 am and enjoy it in the way Tom Atkins intended.