5/10
The Black Sheep of the Halloween Franchise
31 October 2019
This film has somewhat of a reputation surrounding it, so I was sort of looking forward to my viewing. "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" is the only "Halloween" sans the famous masked psychopath Michael Meyers. Since Michael Meyers 'dies' at the end of "Halloween II" (only to be resurrected in "Halloween: The Return of Michael Meyers"), John Carpenter's plan was to produce a new Halloween themed movie every year, and this film was to be the first film to kick off that new wave of anthology Halloween movies. This movie apparently didn't do at that well at the box office, so Carpenter's plans for an anthology series were scrapped, and "Halloween 4" featured Mikey once more.

Since I knew all that backstory going into this viewing, I knew I wasn't one of the people that was going to be disappointed by that lack of Mike; I was more curious to see where the series would've headed had Carpenter been able to take it in the direction he wanted (note- he has only producer and music credits on this, but he would've been the one to choose the stories to produce each year). As the story got started, I immediately found myself noticing a drop in quality between the first two films in the series. While the second film's directing style (and even the story) was noticeably less impressive than that in the first film, this third film seemed like it would've been passable as a Sci-Fi channel movie of the week. The acting is all around pretty horrible; the dialogue is stilted and uncomfortable; and the story is predictable. The only saving graces that this film boasts are some of the practical effects and it has a few cool ideas; the only problem is it doesn't know how to execute those ideas very well. As a "Halloween" movie, I don't think this really works, and as a standalone film, aside from a few moments, I feel pretty apathetic towards it. I suppose if you're a franchise completionist then you should see this, but I would have a hard time recommending it to anyone just on a whim. It feels too much like a cheap made for TV movie for me to really take it seriously.
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