Product: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Rating: 3.0
Sci-Fi/Horror combo is really Quatermass lite.
Eager to do something different and take the Halloween franchise in an entirely different direction, John Carpenter and Debra Hill hired british sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale (creator of the famous Quatermass thrillers of the 50's and 60's) to create a new story. The result is a wildly implausible, albeit entertaining, mess of a movie.An emergency room doctor uncovers the nefarious scheme of a mad halloween mask maker to pull a "practical joke" on October 31st by using a combination of ancient Druid magic and computer technology to zap kids in the head and turn their craniums into bug factories. While writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace does manage to generate a few suspensful sequences, his script lacks an interior logic that severely hampers his building of a credible aura of dread, menace, or conspiracy throughout the movie.The end result is more of an entertaining guilty pleasure than a successful movie, just as long as you don't expect any serious scares. It's a practical joke, remember? Recommended. Really.