Halloween 3: Season of the Witch - You will probably hate this film (personally, I loved it)

Let’s get it out of the way... ‘Halloween 3: Season of the Witch’ was a critical (and more importantly) commercial failure.  Basically, after the highly successful (and profitable) ‘Halloween’ and ‘Halloween 2’ people were expecting big things from the third instalment.  The first two were about a – seemingly unstoppable – killer called Michael Myers and his relentless desire to generally murder youngsters.  However, Part 3’s ultimate ‘failure’ was that it basically has nothing to do with the first two instalments.

Part 3 is a completely new story which doesn’t follow on at all.  And that was the main ‘problem’ people had with it.  So, it got immediately slated and has kind of fallen off the radar, as far as horror movies go.

However, if you don’t really look at it as a ‘Halloween’ movie and simply a stand-alone horror film, it does tend to take on a life of its own.  We join Dr Daniel Challis when a possibly mentally-unstable old man is brought into his hospital, only to be murdered in very suspicious circumstances.  Therefore, Dr Dan teams up with the man’s grieving daughter to investigate.  And, their investigation takes them to an out-of-the-way town in the middle of nowhere, run by the – somewhat creepy – Conal Cochran.

First of all, Dr Dan is a rather different hero.  He isn’t very reliable, frequently forgets to visit his ex-wife, buys his kids rubbish present, flirts with pretty much anything in a skirt in the hospital where he works and then sleeps with younger women in meets in a bar (all while wearing a handkerchief hanging out of the back of his trousers).  And, did I mention while he’s doing all this he’s also trying to save the world from cyborg robots and fiendish occult plots.

But, dodgy heroes aside, the film is actually pretty creepy.  First of all you have the music (which is done by horror legend John Carpenter) which adds to the dark, unsettling atmosphere.  Then you have Dan O’herlihy, playing arguably one of the most nasty villains in cinematic history.  He really does have a plan or two up his sleeve and it isn’t nice!  Then you have the general gore.  It’s hardly a ‘gore-fest’ but when the gore comes, it’s pretty gruesome and what isn’t gory is pretty unsettling.
If you want to give Halloween 3 a go, don’t view it as part of the franchise.  Just be in a mood for a darkly-nasty horror tale.  It’s also probably best to put at least half of your brain on hold for the duration – that way you can ignore the odd plot hole.  I don’t care what people say about it.  I still love it!

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one