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yendiToday's film is the one movie that just doesn't fit in with the rest of the series. It's the Halloween-in-name-only Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Concept: Silver Shamrock, the world's largest maker of Halloween masks (with a whopping three models to choose from!), is actually run by a pagan cult. And like all pagan cults, they want to kill all the world's children. Their leader, Conal Cochran, plans to do this by embedding a computer chip with pieces of Stonehenge in each mask. When the proper signal airs (right after the massive-hyped Silver Shamrock-sponsored airing of the movie Halloween), kids everywhere will die horribly, and snakes and insects will crawl out of their heads.
Body Count: It's a little bit tough to keep track of here. I count seven human deaths, and about as many androids. The major differences between the humans and androids is that the androids are supposed to emote poorly when they die.
Really Bad Kills: None, really.
Really Good Kills: That opening kill of Grimbridge is just classic. The android enters the poor man's hospital room and sticks his thumbs in the man's eyes. Just wince-worthy, establishing exactly how nasty things can get in this world. The fact that the android (looking like a normal human, of course), then goes out to his car an immolates himself is an added bonus.
And, of course, it doesn't get more classic than the mask itself. Watching a head slowly cave in and sizzle, and then seeing bugs crawl out. Just horrifying.
Celebrities: Our hero is played by Tom Atkins, aka Lt. Diehl on The Rockford Files, the good cop who wasn't Bruce Campbell in Maniac Cop, and Nick Castle in the real version of The Fog (I'd point out that he's a much better actor than Tom Welling, but that would be damning with faint praise). Stacey Nelkin is probably better known for dating Woody Allen and marrying Barry Bostwick than for anything else. Joshua John Miller (as Atkins's son) played the creepy kid vampire in Near Dark (and is Jason Patric's half brother). And the late Dan O'Herlihy was a great character actor who most of you probably remember most as the Old Man (he never has a name, but runs the corporation) in Robocop.
Denouement: Ellie and Daniel make it into the mask factory, and are separated, captured, etc. After Daniel kills a ton of androids and Cochran himself (thanks to the power of Stonehenge -- don't leave home without it!), he finds Ellie and escapes, only to find that Ellie has been replaced by an Fembot! Oh no! Fortunately, he kills her, too, and starts calling TV stations to get the program shut down. Alas, at least one station continues to air the movie, and as we fade to black, we hear that Silver Shamrock jingle. The world is doomed!
Miscellany: Tommy Lee Wallace is credited as director and screenwriter, and he certainly had a huge hand in both. He's also directed and/or wrote such sequels as Fright Night 2, Amityville 2: The Possession, and Vampires: Los Muertos, and probably peaked with the TV-mini for It. That said, he wasn't alone here. The original story, at least, was conceived by Nigel Keane, who is best known for the Quartermass movies. Carpenter also produced this and had a huge hand in things, and his desire to up the gore quotient led to Keane's walking away.
Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice cameo as the TV announcer.
Unlike many unrelated sequels (see the later Return of the Living Dead movies, Super Mario World 2, etc), this was never something that was produced as another title and then forced into a new name. Carpenter had decided that telling more Michael Myers stories would be a bad idea (something that, creatively at least, turned out to be true), but a movie that continued the idea of evil happenings on Halloween was a damned fine one.
The Silver Shamrock jingle ("Eight more Days 'til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween") is set to the tune of "London Bridge." It is also impossible to get out of your head after hearing it. Seriously. If you're ever trapped in a world with Alfie Bester-inspired telepaths, this is the jingle you need going through your head to protect you.
Overall: This movie gets a lot of grief for simply not being a Michael Myers movie, which just isn't fair. It's a damned fine film for what it is. The Kneale-inspired conspiracy themes are damned nifty, and although the movie is over the top at times, I love the combination of ancient mystical beliefs and modern technology (probably one of many reasons that Prince of Darkness, which merged Judeo-Christian myths with technology, remains one of my favorite films of all time).
That's not to say there aren't problems here. First, if you're targeting kids, maybe you should do it with the airing of a movie other than Halloween? I mean, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! is probably more likely to have kids watching. Also, given the whole issue of time zones, are they only planning on zapping west coast kids? And then there's the fact that this company makes three generic masks, and that's it. Did they simply drive the companies that made Superman and Barbie masks out of business?
Still, those are minor nitpicks. We get androids. We get melting heads. We get conspiracy theories. And we get some damned fine acting. We also get a sorely underappreciated score. Carpenter co-composed it with Alan Howarth, and it's quite fun, even if a little synth heavy (it was the '80s, after all). Overally, as long as you're not looking for a slasher movie, this is a damned fine view. If you need the Shape walking around in his Shatner mask, wait until tomorrow.
Concept: Silver Shamrock, the world's largest maker of Halloween masks (with a whopping three models to choose from!), is actually run by a pagan cult. And like all pagan cults, they want to kill all the world's children. Their leader, Conal Cochran, plans to do this by embedding a computer chip with pieces of Stonehenge in each mask. When the proper signal airs (right after the massive-hyped Silver Shamrock-sponsored airing of the movie Halloween), kids everywhere will die horribly, and snakes and insects will crawl out of their heads.
Body Count: It's a little bit tough to keep track of here. I count seven human deaths, and about as many androids. The major differences between the humans and androids is that the androids are supposed to emote poorly when they die.
Really Bad Kills: None, really.
Really Good Kills: That opening kill of Grimbridge is just classic. The android enters the poor man's hospital room and sticks his thumbs in the man's eyes. Just wince-worthy, establishing exactly how nasty things can get in this world. The fact that the android (looking like a normal human, of course), then goes out to his car an immolates himself is an added bonus.
And, of course, it doesn't get more classic than the mask itself. Watching a head slowly cave in and sizzle, and then seeing bugs crawl out. Just horrifying.
Celebrities: Our hero is played by Tom Atkins, aka Lt. Diehl on The Rockford Files, the good cop who wasn't Bruce Campbell in Maniac Cop, and Nick Castle in the real version of The Fog (I'd point out that he's a much better actor than Tom Welling, but that would be damning with faint praise). Stacey Nelkin is probably better known for dating Woody Allen and marrying Barry Bostwick than for anything else. Joshua John Miller (as Atkins's son) played the creepy kid vampire in Near Dark (and is Jason Patric's half brother). And the late Dan O'Herlihy was a great character actor who most of you probably remember most as the Old Man (he never has a name, but runs the corporation) in Robocop.
Denouement: Ellie and Daniel make it into the mask factory, and are separated, captured, etc. After Daniel kills a ton of androids and Cochran himself (thanks to the power of Stonehenge -- don't leave home without it!), he finds Ellie and escapes, only to find that Ellie has been replaced by an Fembot! Oh no! Fortunately, he kills her, too, and starts calling TV stations to get the program shut down. Alas, at least one station continues to air the movie, and as we fade to black, we hear that Silver Shamrock jingle. The world is doomed!
Miscellany: Tommy Lee Wallace is credited as director and screenwriter, and he certainly had a huge hand in both. He's also directed and/or wrote such sequels as Fright Night 2, Amityville 2: The Possession, and Vampires: Los Muertos, and probably peaked with the TV-mini for It. That said, he wasn't alone here. The original story, at least, was conceived by Nigel Keane, who is best known for the Quartermass movies. Carpenter also produced this and had a huge hand in things, and his desire to up the gore quotient led to Keane's walking away.
Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice cameo as the TV announcer.
Unlike many unrelated sequels (see the later Return of the Living Dead movies, Super Mario World 2, etc), this was never something that was produced as another title and then forced into a new name. Carpenter had decided that telling more Michael Myers stories would be a bad idea (something that, creatively at least, turned out to be true), but a movie that continued the idea of evil happenings on Halloween was a damned fine one.
The Silver Shamrock jingle ("Eight more Days 'til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween") is set to the tune of "London Bridge." It is also impossible to get out of your head after hearing it. Seriously. If you're ever trapped in a world with Alfie Bester-inspired telepaths, this is the jingle you need going through your head to protect you.
Overall: This movie gets a lot of grief for simply not being a Michael Myers movie, which just isn't fair. It's a damned fine film for what it is. The Kneale-inspired conspiracy themes are damned nifty, and although the movie is over the top at times, I love the combination of ancient mystical beliefs and modern technology (probably one of many reasons that Prince of Darkness, which merged Judeo-Christian myths with technology, remains one of my favorite films of all time).
That's not to say there aren't problems here. First, if you're targeting kids, maybe you should do it with the airing of a movie other than Halloween? I mean, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! is probably more likely to have kids watching. Also, given the whole issue of time zones, are they only planning on zapping west coast kids? And then there's the fact that this company makes three generic masks, and that's it. Did they simply drive the companies that made Superman and Barbie masks out of business?
Still, those are minor nitpicks. We get androids. We get melting heads. We get conspiracy theories. And we get some damned fine acting. We also get a sorely underappreciated score. Carpenter co-composed it with Alan Howarth, and it's quite fun, even if a little synth heavy (it was the '80s, after all). Overally, as long as you're not looking for a slasher movie, this is a damned fine view. If you need the Shape walking around in his Shatner mask, wait until tomorrow.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:12 pm (UTC)One of the top ten great line readings in film history: 'Dick, I am very disappointed.'
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:23 pm (UTC)And how on earth did they get that many pieces of Stonehenge? What did they do, drag away one of the blocks -- with no one noticing, of course.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:44 pm (UTC)As for Stonehenge, they were supposed to be really tiny pieces. Maybe there were missing blocks?
That, or they had the portable Stonehenge from Spinal Tap.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 10:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 10:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:24 pm (UTC)And the Shape's mask emotes slightly better than good old Bill.
It is nice to know exactly what was going on in this movie. I have actually seen the entire thing, but over the course of perhaps 5 or 6 years and in half hour chunks (out of order), so I never really understood the plot. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:46 pm (UTC)It's worth watching the movie at least once all the way through, just to catch the entire plot. It's certainly one of the more detailed plots in the series.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:41 pm (UTC)If I remember correctly, they were actually available for sale from Don Post. I wonder if anyone actually bought one.
Also, fun literary fact: the novelization for this (as well as part 2, and The Fog and Videodrome) was written by 'Jack Martin,' otherwise known as acclaimed horror writer Dennis Etchison cashing an easy paycheck.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:47 pm (UTC)I didn't realize that Etchison wrote the novelisation. the '80s were so much fun, with every movie getting a novelization whether it was necessary or not (I still have my signed copy of Alan Dead Foster's Clash of the Titans).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:53 pm (UTC)I didn't even know he was sick. (I gave my copy of his Dark Star novelization to a Carpenter-fanatic friend of mine.)
Yeah, and some novelizationists (it's a word now) went on to bigger things — before he was a gay/AIDS memoirist, Paul Monette novelized Scarface and, I believe, Schrader's Cat People. Nowadays it seems like comics writers or second/third-tier SF writers get all the genre novelizations. I've said it before, but my favorite novelization remains Campbell Black's Raiders of the Lost Ark. He knew he couldn't duplicate Spielberg's thrills on the page, so he didn't even try, but you sure understood the Indy/Belloq feud a lot better.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 02:57 pm (UTC)That may be the best typo I've ever made.
My favorite novelization is probably Max Allen Collins's Daylight, which is so much better than the movie, you'd think that the movie was the adaptation.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:33 pm (UTC)I'm a huge fan of late-70s/early 80s movie novelizations. Dunno why exactly.
Oh yes, the geek thing. That's why.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 05:58 pm (UTC)*dingdingding*
We have a winner!
It's all your fault
Date: 2005-10-26 03:14 pm (UTC)Re: It's all your fault
Date: 2005-10-26 05:58 pm (UTC)Oh no not again!
Date: 2005-10-26 03:43 pm (UTC)VERY creepy.
Re: Oh no not again!
Date: 2005-10-26 05:57 pm (UTC)And yeah, the cutesy voices are the finishing touch.
Re: Oh no not again!
Date: 2005-10-26 06:15 pm (UTC)I have the MOST ANNOYING SONG MEMORY EVER - which means that the most random snippet of song, whether it be a commercial jingle, a song I heard once in 1983, or a television theme song, will get tucked away in my memory (lyrics intact), and re-emerge for no apparent reason, in all its full glory - and then get stuck on repeat on my head.
I have a client that knows about this and likes to torture me by mentioning the word "dollop" - whereupon that really annoying sour cream commercial ("start with a smile and a dollop, a dollop") gets stuck in my head. Evil.
If only I could use my memory for good instead of evil/inanity, I could be so smart... *sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 05:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-26 04:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-30 04:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-01 09:51 pm (UTC)