Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
R | 22 October 1982 (USA)
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A terrified toy salesman is mysteriously attacked, and at the hospital, babbles and clutches the year's most popular Halloween costume, an eerie pumpkin mask. Suddenly, Doctor Daniel Challis finds himself thrust into a terrifying nightmare.

Reviews
GamerTab

That was an excellent one.

DipitySkillful

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

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Plustown

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

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Portia Hilton

Blistering performances.

odedtra

If you don't want to read the whole review, I will open by saying that this film is not as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, I was surprised by how mediocre it was.The original idea of Debra Hill and John Carpenter was to make an anthology series, releasing every year different Halloween film with distinguished plot and characters. 'Season Of The Witch' was supposed to be the first in this series of films. Sadly, after the bad reviews that this film got, we were back to Michael Myres and films like 'Resurrection'.The plot of the film looks like it was taken straight out of a Scooby Doo episode (actually, Scooby Doo Mystery Inc had taken inspiration from this film to one of their episode), and just like a Scooby Doo episode - it is silly, and it makes a little sense. Unfortunately, unlike Scooby Doo, this film doesn't seem to know it. If the film had taken itself less serious, and had been more self aware, it would have been much, much better.Another Scooby-Dooish problem of the film is that it lacks of scares. It is very creepy sometimes (for example, the commercial for the masks), but the jump scares are cheap and don't really work. The film could have been an excellent children's Halloween film if it was not as violent as it is. This leaves the viewer with the feeling that the film doesn't really knows what it tries to be.The best thing about this film is the music, which is just like in the original Halloween, implifies the intensity of the creepy moments in the film and makes them even creepier. Another thing that the film has is a good entertainment value, even if not from the right reasons. I found the first scene very laughable, and found myself laughing due to bad acting or stupid plot development in some scenes throughout the film. But even the plot, as silly as it can sometimes be, is interesting enough (if you only turn the brain off) to keep you focused for the whole 90 minutes of the film.So yeah, this film is just a mediocre film, and a fun way to pass the time if you want some cheap entertainment in the background while laughing with friends. In the end, this film is not as bad as it was made out to be, it's just another creepier, more violent episode of Scooby Doo.

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Eric Stevenson

The "Halloween" movies were originally intended to be an anthology series which is why this doesn't have any connection to the other Halloween films. Due to the poor reception of this movie, they went back to making the whole thing about Michael Myers. This is a very dumb movie with a ridiculous plot. Children are buying Halloween masks from a company that's using them to kill children. Like Leonard Maltin said, "Nice, huh?". They die when a commercial airs and the mask makes spiders and snakes come out of the kids' bodies and kill their parents. It's as dumb as it sounds.The operation is caused by robots with yellow blood or yellow oil or whatever. The main character fights robots to stop snakes and spiders from coming out of kid's bodies. It's as stupid as it sounds. The only good parts are the very end and when the main character is escaping. The Nostalgia Critic gave a brief audio review of it but oddly enough he later said he liked it! I'm going with his first opinion and dismiss the film for being stupid. It's also mostly boring with little progression in the story at all. *1/2

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Fabiano Lourenço

Horror franchises are naturally inclined to become stale, obvious and boring after a while, say, after the third or fourth installment, when the formulaic script simply has nowhere else to go. There's no reason whatever to supposed the same wouldn't happen with Halloween. Everybody knows John Carpenter DID NOT want Halloween to become a franchise. But the first two movies made a lot of money, and then they decided they HAD to release a new Michael Myers story every couple of years, if only to satisfy fans of easy and predictable slasher flicks. The third installment in the franchise- Season of the Witch- was a huge departure from the story told in the first two parts- and was also a sign that the real intention was to create a collection of stories based on Halloween, but independent of each other. Of course, it did not succeed, and in the fourth chapter there we went to meet our "dear" Michael Myers and his endless thirst for blood again.It was really a pity things went this direction. Because, truth be told, every Halloween sequel was worse than the previous one, with an indestructible killer who simply was a "seasonal" variation of Jason Vorhees, and all the writers had to do at a certain point was creating a new excuse for bringing Michael back, because the killer invariably ended "dead" or severely injured in each chapter. The rest of the "plot" was basically the same in every movie: Halloween night, Michael comes back to Haddonfield, people are sure he's either dead or only a legend, he starts to kill everyone in sight, someone realizes he's alive, there's a relative of his that he's willing to kill, etc, etc.If this third installment in the franchise had been successful, things could have been different. And instead of having THE SAME MOVIE over and over again, we could have now a very interesting collection of good horror stories. Why didn't this work out? My theory is very simple: this didn't work out not only because people wanted Michael Myers back after his hospital bloodbath in Halloween II, but also because Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a very, VERY bad movie. People might have thought: If the other installments in this series be like this one, then we'd rather have Michael Myers coming back every damn year for more of the same.What can I say not to "spoil" (sic) the party of anyone else? Well, I will not describe the "plot", yet I must say this film does not have any sense whatsoever, bad actors, bad story line, horrible villain, pathetic death scenes, and you end up asking yourself if what you're seeing on screen is really for real. The movie does have a promising beginning, but it all goes downhill from there. I must confess, being a John Carpenter work, the soundtrack is eerie and fantastically atmospheric. Yet the story being told does not deserve a good soundtrack. I think the best way to describe this thing is: bizarre. It's really weird, but not in a positive, Kafka kind of way. It's weird because it doesn't go anywhere and has an awkward story line.I will not give any spoilers, so go and watch for yourself if you haven't yet. I can assure you that you'll understand why the chose to bring Mike back after this "thing".

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a_chinn

John Carptenter's frequent collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace wrote and directed this non-Michel Meyers Halloween sequel that's more of an "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" type of story than slasher film. Carpenter regular Tom Atkins plays a man investigating a mysterious Halloween costume company run by evil scientist Dan O'Herlihy. The film does have a bit slower of pace than I'd have liked, but I did like the creepy company town vibe that's nicely oppressive. This was the last film that involved producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who also did uncredited rewrites. Carpenter and Alan Howarth provided the film's score, so this film still feels consistent with the first two films, even if the story is a drastic departure. Although fans did not like this film at the time of it's release and it had poor box office, I've always liked this oddball entry into the Halloween series and wish there might have been further non-Michel Meyer Halloween films by Carpenter and company.

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