everyday is halloween

halloween iii: season of the witch [1982]

yes virginia this is the third film in the john carpenter halloween franchise but with a wrinkle: michael myers is absent this outing.  no bogeyman except for an evil halloween mask maker named cochran, played with glee by dan o'herlihy, who wants to kill a shitload of children because of a deranged notion that doing so is linked to the ancient traditions of samhain.  cochran has implanted tiny bits of stonehenge within each of his masks and bought some serious airtime on TV so that an on appointed hour all the children wearing cochran's masks and watching his television special will keel over while spiders and snakes crawl out of the masks.

yeah, real creepy.  tom atkins, that stalwart character actor, is an ER physician investigating a murder-suicide that happened on his watch.  the trail leads atkins to cochran's company town populated with robot goons in suits and with very bad '70s hair.  atkins uncovers the plot and well the rest is, you know, curtains for a certain mask maker.

i like this movie not because it is any good but because it is an anomaly.  i gather when the studio got the final box office receipts it was decided that myers will always be the big monster in this franchise.  i imagine teens flocking to the theaters in '82 all let out a huge collective HUH!? when they watched the final production with nary a hatchet onscreen.  after this movie the franchise returned michael myers and that was that.

still, there is some gorgeous halloween imagery in this flick.  the director, and screenwriter, of this film, tommy lee wallace, had an interesting idea by making halloween, the eponymous holiday of the films, the central character of this movie.  the idea is only half-baked.  o'herlihy is a fine bad guy and the movie would simply be flat-assed boring if it wasn't for atkins and o'herlihy being its principals. 

this film is like that jack o'lantern sitting on the neighbor's porch three weeks after halloween, rotting a little but present in its physicality, its shape a reminder of the beauty, terror and mystery of the highest of high holidays, halloween.

boo