Saturday, June 4, 2022

1982 @40: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH

A man flees pursuers, clutching a halloween mask. He lures them into an obstacle strewn yard and escapes. He takes refuge in a petrol station nearby but collapses, muttering about doom, and is ambulances off to hospital. While there, he is visited by one of the creepy men in suits who have tracked him down. The baddie gouges out his eyes and, chased through the hospital by the horrified staff, gets into his car, douses himself in petrol and lights up. BAM! 

The doctor treating him is aghast at this and can't shake it. He has an errand, delivering presents to his kids and estranged wife before he can get on the trail. The ex is never impressed with him but the kids twist that knife even more when the halloween masks he bought them aren't the cool tie-in merchandise that Silver Shamrock has already peddled to them. They sit at the tv in the masks and watch the grating commercial once again. Countdown to Halloween, mere days.

The man from the beginning has a daughter who turns up to id the dad and, incidentally, fill Dr Challis in on how her father came to be hounded by the weirdo suit squad. All this leads to the Doc taking the gal off to Santa Mira California to the factory that makes these, the most popular halloween masks in the whole dang world. And things just get stranger and darker from there.

This is far more plot than I usually supply but there's a reason for that. Let me ask you, are you familiar with the name Nigel Kneale? Sigh, ok. Briefly, Nigel Kneale was a British writer who came into writing for the fledgling television fiction strand of the aby BBC, producing some of the most extraordinary science fiction that has, to this day, been committed to production. His character Quatermass alone and the many stories he wrote for him warrant serious pursuit for the mass of ideas each story bears. To watch an old monochrome Kneale production and feel the concepts streaming out toward you is to experience a modest but genuine revelation. Look him up and follow through. 

John Carpenter, co-chef of the mighty 1978 classic Halloween and Debra Hill proved that they weren't just Americans when they commissioned Kneale to write this screenplay. Halloween II had been a success but it was in danger of imitating the film that imitated it, Friday the 13th, by becoming a string of teenage-murdering monster flicks. Carpenter and Hill wanted something more like an expanded anthology collection where the notion of halloween might bear a multitude of tales. This one, linking the popular suburban rite to its ancient roots was perfect for the visionary British writer. But it went sour quickly.

Kneale's tale had as much folklore, technology and psychology as horror but the bossboy De Laurentis wanted blood and guts and Kneale took his name off. Carpenter, who wasn't directing, kept on with it and the result was a shonky blend of the Kneale slowburn and early '80s genre, including more than one diegetic insertions of the 1978 Halloween on tvs in scenes. Carpenter and Alan Howarth provided another electronic score of great merit and the title sequence which shows '80s computer graphics move in time with the music to create an Atari-ish jack o' lantern is superb. But that's where the real greatness and this film part ways.

Halloween III is a plod and it's often a grating plod. Does anyone, now or then, easily allow a fiery sexual connection between the earnestly unbonkable Tom Aitken and the decades-younger porcelain wonder that is Stacey Nelkin? Well, they go at it like teenagers at a high school formal and it still rings with profound unpleasance. This feature of the tale would not cut it in a remake (unless Rob Zombie was interested). 

Dan O'Herilhy is the silver eminence at the center of the big nasty that will attack the world through one of its fun holidays (even though most of the world doesn't do much at all for Halloween outside the USA) and he's more than suited to the role of the edgy urbane paternal terrorist. The sadly underused Nancy Kyes (veteran, as Nancy Loomis, of Halloween I, II, and The Fog) gets one scene before being squeezed into angry high pitched squawk on the other end of the phone. And the range of plastic faced automatons perform as their robotic roles demand.

Too many idiotic coincidences later, we get a very masterful and solid final act which says everything the long previous two couldn't quite articulate. This film goes from dull to wow in a very short time before the credits roll. And there's the pity of it. Because this film only works for its post hoc admirers it flopped for anyone expecting the next slasher movie, which was everyone. Michael Myers' only appearances were on tv screens within scenes. What might have become an ever expanding idea of where cinema might take the popular festival just shut back down to an increasingly uninteresting series of masked stabber flicks. I like stabber flicks but will have to admit that, for all their goofiness, the Friday the 13th sequels take more chances and manage to please both connoisseurs and casual popcorn gorgers. This was the first and last chance for the Halloween franchise and it was blown.

All was not lost, however. Carpenter wrote, directed and scored a film a few years later which paid clear tribute to Nigel Kneale and credibly honour his tradition of ideas-based sci-horror. Prince of Darkness, a movie I can watch at least in part, several times a year. I wonder, if the energy and creative will that made such a marvel of marginal cinema had risen for Halloween III, would we have a genre tradition knocked off course in the best way? Probably not without a renaming and a lower starting rung. But it was obviously really worth a try at one point. 

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