movie: Halloween III Season of the Witch
starring: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin
genre: Horror, Thriller
year: 1982
format: Shaw Video On Demand
plot: After a mysterious death takes place in his hospital, a doctor teams up with the daughter of the patient to find out what happened. Tracing the steps her father made in the days leading up to his murder, they find themselves at a small town factory that creates Hallowe'en masks. Before long, they learn the owner of the factory has planned to use the masks to kill millions by remote control.
I've read that this was suppose to have been the launch pad to turn the Halloween films into more of an anthology, hence it's complete departure from the first two. I get where that was going, and have to say, that it would have been a brilliant thing to do. The only trouble was, audiences thirty years ago didn't have the brains to see that. They saw only that it didn't follow the continued storyline from parts 1 and 2, and didn't really give it a chance.
With that said, the plot of this installment in the series, falls apart in the last act, giving itself to genre confusion. I think the robot body snatchers was a good idea, and I think the ancient Druid storyline was good. I just don't think they were mixed well. Were this to be remade, it would be wise to pick one plot or the other.
As a stand alone film, it works until the last fifteen minutes, then it just seems like a scrabbled mess of overlapping stories. As a part of the Halloween movie series, it doesn't fit simply for the fact they never came back to the idea of an anthology; they continued with a slasher film for the rest of the franchise.
I'd love to say I found some big bad hidden message here, given many other fans and critics over the years have talked about it in conjunction to consumerism and corporate evils, but that was barely a note from what saw. Personally, I think the movie The Stuff managed to tackle that theme much better.
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