Halloween III: Season of the Witch
                                            (1982)
                                               review by Head Cheeze

Sometimes a movie is made and it's as if it was crafted as a sort of expensive prank. Halloween III: Season of the Witch is one such film. It is a film I take as not only a personal assault on me, but on every fan of horror films around the world. It's a cinematic act of war. This time it's personal!

Okay, how do you follow up two of the most successful horror films of all time? Well, glad you asked that question, because, apparently, those behind Halloween III didn't. Instead they chose to abandon the original film's storyline altogether to give us a spooky story about masks, bugs and robots. Why? I dunno, ask John Carpenter and Debra Hill. They reasoned that the story of Michael Myers was at an
empasse, so they felt the need to move on. Carpenter's idea was to use the Halloween franchise as a sort of anthology series. Luckily Season of the Wich bombed so badly that we were never subjected to Halloween IV: Sweet Tarts Revenge, or whatever the plan was, and we got back to basics with Myers and a new group of flesh dartboards. However, as much as one may try, Halloween III cannot be ignored for it is one of the greatest examples of rampant abuse of carte' blanche in horror cinema history.

Halloween III is the story of a small cat that has psychic powers and uses them to solve crime in the year 2085. The cat must fight a group of renegade ninjas and..............Oh, I'm sorry. I was wishing I was reviewing something else.

Halloween III, in fact, is much worse than the aformentioned psychic cat story. Instead we get an evil Celtic corporation bent on destroying the world with Halloween masks that, when exposed to a signal disguised as the worlds most annoying commercial jingle, crack open and drop out a bunch of spiders, snakes, and bugs. My question is....well....why? Why not have the masks release mustard gas, or anthrax,
or even a really bad odor? Why release easily killed spiders, harmless snakes (Boa Constrictors are about as dangerous as a beach ball) and millipedes? Would this plan do anything more than raise the demand for exterminators? Is that what Silver Shamrock industries really is? A front for the Exterminator's Union of America? I mean, I can't see anyone being more than a bit incovenienced by this (save for the children
who apparently die when they have the masks during the signals broadcast), so forgive me if I am less than terrified of the Silver Shamrock Novelty Company. On the ANTAGONIST THREAT LEVEL SCALE (ATLS for all of you unaware that I just made that up) I would rank Silver Shamrock somewhere between Skeletor from the Masters of the Universe, and the Cavity Creeps.

While it is obvious that I despise Halloween III with every thread of my being, it DOES reside on my DVD shelf as a morbid curiosity. When people come over and ask to watch something REALLY bad, it's either this, Battlefield Earth, or Bloodsucking Freaks.

The only positive thing about the film aside from the fact that it ends, was Tommy Lee Wallace's ability to imitate Carpenter's style fairly convincingly. Too bad he was filming rubbish.

The Region One DVD from Good Times is another $10 dollar or less affair, featuring nothing by way of extras, a slightly better than VHS transfer and a handy box in which to store it all in. Is it worth $10 dollars? Consider that $10 dollars can get you a small pizza, several boxes of jelly beans, or pretty well pissed on cheap beer at the nearest hole-in-the-wall bar, and the resounding answer is no.

Should you just steal it? Sure.