WELCOME TO THE WACKY WORLD OF WILLIAM WHEATON

Here you will find musings from genre fan/writer William Wheaton. No not Wil Wheaton from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” This Wheaton is the author of Electric Beauty and the Beast, Hollywood Wiretapping and Aeon Electron. What wackiness and weirdocracies will spew from the mind of Wheaton? One never knows, so stay turned to find out. - CCF

HALLOWEEN 3: SEASON OF THE WITCH

Special to PollyStaffle.com

There are more then a few lessons to learn from Halloween 3 (which was released in 1982). This is much a curiosity in the history of horror filmmaking. If you’ve seen the original two Halloweens you will notice immediately upon watching the third it deserted the original storyline of Michael Myers, who was basically a serial killer that can not be killed. Apparently, for a while the plan was to expand the series to be a different plotline each Halloween, but only one such film was ever completed, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.

They returned to the original storyline with Michael Myers for the next Halloween film. Halloween 4 is weak. I’m watching the fourth one right now as I’m writing and it’s almost impossible to sit through. The reason it sucks? They had done it all with Michael Myers in 1 and 2. This storyline centers around the orphaned daughter of the Jamie Lee Curtis character from the first film. Shockingly, Michael Myers has escaped and his old shrink is back screaming just like in the first two movies. That’s because it’s the same fucking movie remade. It’s almost exactly the same movie with horny teenagers and Michael Myers stalking the suburban streets and everything. Michael Myers kills the entire police station full of cops, and the shrink says Michael Myers is not a man for the 7th or 12th time, something like that. Yawn.

It’s a shame. I quite fancy Halloween 3. It is vastly superior to part four. Here is the point in the film review when I have to give a rough plot synopsis. I’ll make this quick because this part is always boring as hell to write. Here it goes: A man is found stark raving mad and taken to an emergency room. He says to the doctor “they’re going to kill us all.” A dude with a suit comes into the emergency room, kills the other dude, gets back into the car, pulls a Vietnamese monk set yourself on fire deal. A woman who says she’s the dead man’s daughter comes looking for answers from the doctor. There’s this great little bit that keeps coming back throughout the film that’s a TV ad for these Halloween masks counting down the days to Halloween.

Coincidence? Of course not, the last place the dead man was is picking up those Halloween masks from the factory where they were made - the Silver Shamrock company. So of course the doctor and the chick go up there to see what’s going on. It does not disappoint. I dig this, the masks all have a little silver corporate logo button on them, and when the final Halloween big give away contest commercial is played whoever is wearing the masks their heads shrink and insects and snakes come out of their eye sockets. I did not see that one coming! Fucked up! There are also a whole bunch of weird dudes in suits that turn out to be killer automatons made of clockwork that are full of yellow goo, sort of like the yellow goo in Phantasm from the same general era. It’s all a plot to bring Halloween back to its darker Celtic roots, hence the company being called Silver Shamrock. There’s a real “everybody dies” kind of ending.

I think it’s a great little film. John Carpenter himself co-scored the excellent early gothic/industrial feeling electronic soundtrack. Those Silver Shamrock commercials are eerie as all get out. The thematic overtones of mass child homicide are fucked up enough to keep me riveted. Halloween 3:Season of the Witch may have used a supernatural horror, but the intention to kill children is not completely alien to the human psyche and the actual mass slaughter of children is not unknown to the human condition. Evil takes the form of a corporation and there is the element of the murder of a whistleblower, which has some very real power as well. So it is a fucked up scary horror movie. It works.
I dig it!

No really, this is a great little horror film. There’s no reason that a series of horror films titled Halloween would all have to be about this one serial killer that is vaguely supernatural only in that he’s more difficult to kill then any human really is. The Halloween masks slaughter the children - that’s pretty creepy on its own. It did not need to be a rehash of the teenage-girls-are-killed-after-they-have-just-had-sex type stuff.

Alas, it was not well received, and so old Michael Myers was brought back for number 4, and then followed by number 5, until Rob Zombie grabbed the franchise and started back with 2 and now I’m told there’s a third one in the works, but it has nothing to do with this film.

Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, I say fuck yeah! Watch it!

- William Wheaton, May 2010

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