Watching this on AMC last night, I wondered how this material might have turned out if someone like David Cronenberg had been in charge, or if John Carpenter had directed rather than just produced.
This movie has its moments. The stifling atmosphere in the conformist “Walking Tall”-type small town is palpable. (Appropriately, the movie is set in “Santa Mira.”)
Those commercials were suitably irritating, and the whole concept of TV-activated masks had great potential.
But some huge flaws hobble it from the start.
(Little wonder it’s an episode of “How Did This Get Made?”)
I don’t mean that it’s non-canonical — I’m not as uptight about that stuff.
I’m talking about the lead just not believable as a doctor, for instance; he looks like a poorly disguised undercover cop — a low-rent Dennis Farina. I like Tom Aikins but he’s miscast here — or else should’ve just shaved that distracting cheesy mustache before filming.
And although the actor playing the Irishman villain is a real Irishman, his Irish accent sucks.
Halloween III looks like it had two different cinematographers or something. It goes from looking pretty good to “ugly Canadian movie” from one scene to the next.
And as one critic noted, “Any plot dependent on stealing a chunk of Stonehenge and shipping it secretly across the Atlantic is going to be shaky from the start.” Plus “there are four time zones across the United States, so the western seaboard has four hours to get the fatal curse-inducing advertisement off the air. Not a great plan.” (Although the time zone problem is “addressed” here which makes it kind of worse.)
Although Vincent Canby wrote, hyperbolically: “Halloween III manages the not easy feat of being anti-children, anti-capitalism, anti-television and anti-Irish all at the same time.”
It’s one of those “So why don’t they just kill that one guy?” movies that drive me crazy.
Yet I sat there watching the whole thing anyway.
