Tag Line : The Night NO ONE comes home.
Having blown up the 2 main
characters in the part 2 and therefore finishing off any chance
of a third film, but beleiving there was still more money to be
made in the Halloween series, John Carpenter was left with the
slight problem of how to continue the franchise.
The solution, make a third film with all new characters and an entirely differant plot. Brilliant (NOT) ! Yes thats right "Halloween 3" a sequel that is not a sequel as such. This time the plot revolves around a fiendish mask making company that are planning to commit mass sacrifice by selling masks that will kill the wearer on Halloween night.
The story starts off in Calafornia. An old man is taken to Hospital suffering from exhaustion and anxiety, he is clutching a Halloween mask and keeps muttering "they're going to kill us all". Hours later he is dead and his attacker incinerated when his car explodes in the car park outside.
Bewildered by these bizzarre events, Dr Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) teams up with the victims daughter Ellie and try's to uncover what happened. They trace her fathers last known whereabouts to the Silver Shamrock mask company, which is located in the small Calafornian town of Santa Mira, where he was to have collected a consignment of Halloween masks from.
There they meet the sinister Conal Cochrane, the head of the company who has a fiendish trick-or-treat planned for the children of America. It turns out he has stolen one of the monoliths from stonehenge (and how did he manage that then?) and has harnessed the stones ancient power.
It turns out the masks have a small circuit board, containing elements of the stone, built into the button tag on the back. This, when activated, will shrivel up the head of the wearer. Then, once they're dead, venemous insects and poisonous snakes emerge from the mask to kill any bystanders (and where do they appear from then?).
Unlikely as it seems, this is the case. The company have been advertising heavily on TV, with really annoying adverts sung to the tune of "London brigde is falling down" and the masks are going to be activated when the company shows their main promotional ad on Halloween night.
To compound the films unfeasability further, it turns out that the workers in the mask factory are all androids and in another unlikely plot twist, the first Halloween film is shown playing on the TV during the film.
Now if John Carpenter had called this anything other than "Halloween" and had made it as a stand alone horror movie, this wouldn't be a bad film. But as it is, it just comes accross as a dissapointingly poor sequel. Only see this if you are a completist like myself.
Overall Marks 5/10
Other Information. Apparently John Carpenter wanted to take the series in a new direction with this film, but instead cursed the series to critical damnation, as the film flopped at the box office. Tom Atkins is a regular actor in John Carpenter films, having also starred in "The Fog", "Assault on Precinct 13", "Prince of Darkness" and even having a minor role in "Escape from New York" as one of the prison guards. Various UK video releases of this movie had been heavily cut in places, although this was done by the previous distributors "Thorn-EMI" and not the BBFC. These trimmed the scenes where the old man in the hospital gets his eyes gouged, the scene where they rip the head off the old tramp and most notably, the scene where the lady in the motel has her face blown away by an energy beam and then a bug crawls out of her mouth (instead the scene fades to black before we see her face). However, my version on the "Quantam Leap/Game Entertainment" label appears to be uncut. As the film has not been re-classified by the BBFC, it is possible the distributers accidentally released the uncut version by mistake. The uncut version has also been screened on terestrial TV by the BBC, and on sattelitte by SKY Movies and the Sci-Fi Channel. |
Buy
Online.
Buy the video at Blackstar. |
Other films in the series.
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