Reviewed by Gello
“Halloween III” just expects so much of you. The film never tires of asking you to take your suspension of disbelief to higher levels, only to ask same of you again and again. It starts out interestingly enough. A bunch of expressionless men in grey suits really hate the hell out of this old fella who has a toy store. One of them kills him by yanking his head into pieces, and his daughter (Stacy Nelkin) shows up, meeting her father’s doctor (Tom Atkins). Naturally, they will fall in love at the drop of a hat and have sex. From then, the film would have you believe that Nelkin and Atkins are lost in a supernatural and intriguing mystery. And if you are willing to believe that, you have to believe that a Halloween mask company called Silver Shamrock, run by an aging Boris Karloff look-alike, has taken over a small town in a quite Orwellian way. Then, the film wants you to accept that all the men in grey suits are actually killer robots, made by the Silver Shamrock mask company with the ability to construct said robots in minutes. And if you are willing to believe that, the film asks you to accept that a small pendant attached to these supposedly best-selling masks has the ability to shoot some old lady in the face with a blue lazer that causes bugs to come crawling out of her. Then, you are to believe that a television commercial will trigger this pendant, and that it will do the same to all the poor little kiddies who have begged their parents for the masks. Since when has a mask caused someone to shrivel up and have snakes and cockroaches crawl out of them? The film never answers any questions, and therefore becomes quite goofy. For example, what does the Boris Karloff look-alike have against every kid in America? The only answer he gives is an attempt at a creepy “Do I need a reason?” The flick might be effective if Tommy Lee Wallace, who wrote the thing, had bothered to parallel this fictional story with anything going on in the real world. It has the same paranoid conspiracy-theory feel of 70’s films like “Soilant Green,” without any of the social commentary that made such a stretch in reality so believable, or at least acceptable. Poor old Wallace seems to have gotten in over his head on this one. In stark contrast to the first two “Halloween” movies, which were famous for making a simple concept pull through to the end, the third installment complicates it so much that you lose the convoluted story. John Carpenter and Debera Hall wrote the first two installments, and they must have been on drugs to allow this turn of events. For one thing, it’s not really a sequel at all – with the exception of a fleeting glimpse of the first movie on a TV screen in a bar, you wouldn’t know the other two films existed. I was willing to accept that Michel Myers died in the last film, and wouldn’t be around, but he’s not even mentioned in this film’s world, and goddammit, for these films to work, they need a psycho in a mask chasing people with a knife. While Wallace’s writing is odd, his directing seems pretty good, and there are several moments of absolutely beautiful cinematography. For example, the slow zoom after the kid a kid is killed by his Halloween mask’s blue lazer. And the film wins 1,000,000,000 points in my book for having the balls to kill a kid. If they had titled this film “Silver Shamrock,” or “Conveluded Halloween Robot Story,” or anything, it might have been acceptable. That’s not the case, though, and while it’s not as bad as whining Michael Myers fanatics would have you believe, it’s a bit of a convoluted mess.
