"HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH"....2 MORE DAYS TO..... HALLOWEEN....HALLOWEEN.....HALLOWEEN

Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982)  Horror fans regularly deride and dismiss this one-of-a-kind, stand-alone entry in the 'Halloween' franchise.......

               First, because it committed the blasphemy of having nothing to do with everyone's favorite psycho Michael Meyers slashing his way through a bevy of horny teenagers........(John Carpenter's idea here was to turn the series into a yearly horror anthology, with Halloween night the only link to the varied stories.....)

               Second, because despite the wild and crazy storyline originally concocted by legendary British screenwriter Nigel Kneale ("The Quatermass Xperiment"), the movie came across as cheap, confusing, indifferently acted and directed and burdened with plot holes........

                 Yet, it still holds a warm place in John Carpenter's heart........and because of our undying admiration for the daring imagination and creativity of Nigel Kneale......ours too. (Even if Kneale had his name taken off the film after heavy collaborative tampering with his script....)

                 Tommy Lee Wallace, the credited writer-director, lacked the talent and gumption required to fully embrace Kneale's way-out-there concept and run wild with it..........he glumly directs this movie like typical, low-budget slasher junk.......with regularly scheduled jump scares and gross-out gore inserted into the film as he's working off a checklist with a timetable.

                 Given half a chance, veteran character actor Dan O'Herlihy might have had some juicy fun with his role as a mad toymaking tycoon who implants kids' Halloween masks with chips taken off a chunk of Stonehenge....which he managed to steal and import to this California factory..("We had a devil of a time getting it here..." he boasts in one of the film's best lines...) 

                But the film pays little or no attention to O' Herlihy, whose inexplicable master plan involves detonating the Stonehenge mask-chips on Halloween........so millions of tykes unlucky enough to wear them that night will have their heads crushed, with all manner of supernatural bugs and snakes crawling out of their ruined craniums........

                 A few innocents who uncover the plot (Tom Atkins, Stacy Nelkin) must do battle with      O 'Herlihy's army of business-suited robots who periodically show up to perform Michael Meyers-type executions.....(heads ripped off, power drill lobotomies.....the usual stuff)

                 All this admittedly screwball nuttiness required the kind of breathless, hysterical style that director Val Guest applied to Nigel Kneale's 'Quatermass' films. But Tommy Lee Wallace sticks to the slasher playbook........and the film glumly mopes along to the low moans of John Carpenter's  trademark synthesizer score.

                 Never getting out of low gear, the film gives you more than enough time to examine its many goofy flaws........its one good gimmick, O 'Herlihy's creepy annoying TV ad for his masks, gets run into the ground to the point of unintentional humor.

                And as expected, given the film's angry rejection by fans, Michael Meyers returned to the subsequent 'Halloween' sequels and reboots.......to continue to his racking up of body counts.....(until the current "Halloween" reboot decided that none of them ever existed at all ......)

                 Still, as crappy as it is, "Halloween III" remains sort of fun to watch, in a trainwreck kind of way.......amid all the listless nonsense, you can almost detect the outrageous, shocking fantasy that got plowed under and squashed before it could reach the screen.........the filmmaking process here gave Kneale's script the same treatment the movie's kiddies got from those masks......

                2 stars (**).........if nothing else, you'll never get that TV jungle out of your head........