Halloween: 3, Moviegoers: 0

I kid the third entry in the Halloween series. Because it’s awful. But as it’s one of Darcy The Mail Girl’s favorite movies, and she got to program Friday night for The Drive-In Jamboree, we all watched it together with director Tommy Lee Wallace and stars Tom Atkins and Stacey Nelkin on stage. Allowing for a little too dim a projection—the Jamboree had a lot of technical difficulties—it was basically the best possible circumstance to watch Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.

Rather amusingly, Drive-In Producer Austin Jennings had prepared a supercut of all the times Joe Bob had trashed this movie, which was fun with everyone there and a pro-H3 audience. Did I say “all”? Apparently, it was a mere fraction of the times he had done it.

Because, again, it’s just not a very good movie. If we’re being honest, the crowd was still just barely over 50/50 thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and that’s with a strongly pro-Tommy Lee, pro-Tom Atkins, pro-Stacy Nelkin, pro-Darcy audience.

But let’s go over the whole thing to see if we can’t appreciate the whole thing, what works and what doesn’t. There is a whole lot of good here, admittedly, and it’s worth watching just for the good and fun parts. I don’t think it makes up for the bad because the bad is pretty fundamental. For example, this is not, for the most part, a scary movie, not a spooky movie, not a very Halloween feeling movie. And that’s hard to overcome when you’re calling yourself Halloween 3.

First, the best thing about Halloween 3 is the meta-premise: Rather than making the same movie over and over again, let’s use the franchise to tell a new story every time. (“American Horror Story” uses this premise for its show and it sucks, but the premise of theming each season differently is something good about it. Heck, you could argue that Chris Guest’s mockumentaries are along similar lines: Same kind of humor, same repertory company, different theme each time, and that works really well.)

Second, the premise itself is…I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s certainly bold. The idea that the world’s children are imperiled? You’re playing with fire; people don’t want to see kids get hurt in their dumb Halloween movie. (Horror movies where children are injured or killed tend to be more “serious” and not very fun.) That said, Wallace does a really good job here. The harm to the children is obscured, implicitly horrifying without showing a lot of suffering.

Third, it’s all very competently executed. Dan O’Herlilhy is a standout as the big bad, but Atkins and Nelkin are charming and have good chemistry (which is ironic given how their first scene together was the sex scene, and they had not met prior). The camerawork, although reminiscent of a TV cop show, has some very nice moments. The effects are effective!

The movies from this era seem shockingly energetic and lively compared to most of what we get today.

The bad stuff. Joe Bob delights in pointing out the many bizarre plot holes in this movie, but I maintain that, as egregious as they are, he (and all of us) would gloss over them if the rest of the movie worked. (And indeed, it works for Darcy, so she doesn’t care about the plot holes.)

But they are egregious. Days before Halloween a giant stone from Stonehenge is stolen. Somehow this turns up at a California mask factory to make their magic computer chips that go into the masks…except of course days before Halloween, no masks from a factory are going to ever make it to stores on time. Tom Atkins manages to stop this (well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad) by making a phone call.

“Put me through to television!”

When Tommy Lee Wallace defended the movie to Joe Bob, he says something to the effect of “you gotta get into that Halloween spirit! It’s magic!” Obviously, for its fans, that’s not hard to do. But the movie doesn’t help you much. It’s actually pretty hyper-real, or perhaps more precisely, it hews pretty tightly to a detective drama, like a Dirty Harry or a Mike Hammer. Down to every single woman in the movie throwing herself at Tom Atkins.

One of whom is his wife-at-the-time, which is kind of cute.

The mixture of magic with contemporary technology—especially computer technology—is a difficult one. Where you mostly see it is in things like “there’s a ghost in your cell phone! oooo!” and it’s spotty. Halloween 3 wants to combine magic with computers and mass production, and you have to take the “wizard did it” explanation to some far extremes, like all the TV stations in the country showing the same commercial at the exact same time with everyone watching at the same time.

Interestingly, I think Halloween works in part because it hews closely to reality, and when it starts to break that, it builds the atmosphere and unreality up so that we go from a traditional “maniac slasher” story to a “demonic force” story.

It would be interesting to read the original Nigel Kneale screenplay, though it may not have worked either, even if Wallace hadn’t changed it. Or it might’ve worked the way The Wicker Man works, which would be as good as a failure in the US market.

Joe Bob caved and gave it three stars, though he backtracked quickly the next night.

I have to say, I enjoyed watching it—I mean, I had just arrived in Nashville for the Jamboree, so of course I would. And if they showed it on “The Last Drive-In”, I certainly would watch it again. I might watch it again just to try to study what about it does and doesn’t work. This was certainly the most fun I’d had viewing the movie, including later in 2025, when we would watch it again for the all-night “Spooktacular” in Dallas.

For me, it doesn’t really come together the way it should.

(This review was largely written in July of 2022. I’m a bit behind.)