It’s hard being Halloween III. To its detractors’ credit, the film barely makes a case for itself. It hardly even feels like a film. So much happens, all of which feels like it was hashed-out the day after it was filmed. You have to give John Carpenter and Debra Hill credit for patently wanting to reach out in new directions, to thoroughly divest from what made the first Halloween such a cultural and commercial touchstone. Their desire, it seems, was so palpable that they allowed such a thinly-sketched, hardly-convincing story to tell the tale. If Michael Myers was a demonic moan of horror minimalism as a descent into suburban abjection, this one is a positively demented howl of absurdist maximalism, high concept and even higher in its demand that we don’t question it. This is an unhinged film, one that goes way out on a limb with its conspiratorial vision of corporate control and capitalist satanism.

Yet Tommy Lee Wallace, who directs with much more control and precision than he writes, doesn’t really seem to commit to the bit. Ironically, this is the film’s saving grace. In treating all the material with a kind of nondescript superficiality, in not trying very hard, it gives the film an air of offhand, blasé malevolence that is hard to dismiss, even if it is easily mistaken for mere uncaring banality. And it is entirely befitting the subject matter, which examines a decidedly more strait-laced and corporate wickedness than the prior films in the franchise. Evil, Hannah Arendt famously wrote, is banal after all, and Season of the Witch is a delirious mix of the thoroughly evil and the positively banal.

Maybe Season of the Witch, finally, is that sublime space where nothing converges with everything and gives you exactly what you didn’t know you needed. The plot itself both gives away the lunacy and hardly reveals the demented gravity with which it is treated. While Carpenter’s first Halloween was a magisterial void of a horror classic that limned a world of unknowable brutality that seemed entirely out of time, Halloween III is very much of its moment. Marrying ‘70s flavored pagan paranoia with Carpenter’s typically anti-authoritarian critique of ‘80s Reaganomics and conspirator’s eye for unglimpsable world forces structuring our very daily life, Halloween III is a uniquely disreputable index of one decade’s fixations lurching into another.

We follow Dan (Tom Atkins), a small town doctor, as he helps Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), whose father was murdered by a cult of Irish witches who plan to utilize television to kill all of America’s children via a musical signal their advertisement sends out to receivers in a set of three specific  Halloween masks that they’ve somehow convinced apparently every kid in America to purchase. That’s a mouthful of a plot that only deserves to be written out in a single sentence, with no pauses, and you can obviously stop reading this review now – that tells you all you need to know about whether Season of the Witch is your drink of choice.  

Because from there, we’re off. The presence of Dan O’ Herlihy as the evil corporate overlord Conal Cochran gives the film anticipatory shades of Robocop, but the real cinematic analogue here takes us to the past, to the gleefully disreputable Samuel Fuller, whose mid-century art-trash hybrids found the sweet spot where the off-the-cuff mixed with the thoroughly controlled, where film noir seemed ready to lurch into something nastier and more unmanageable.  Even this film’s most troubling maneuvers, like the ease with which Ellie wants to have sex with the much older Dan, feel oddly appropriate to this disturbed film, part of its nonsensical nightmare logic rather than a sense of erotic fulfillment. Very little of it makes sense, and less of it seems to want to.

If Halloween was a disturbingly elegant machine, this is a jalopy stitched together with dreams and alcohol, the pieces falling off as it inches toward the finish line. Halloween inhabited the nightmare logic of the mind, where the simple act of being a babysitter was enough to open the body to demonic forces lurking always just around the corner. But Halloween III sincerely evokes the furthest reaches of the id, where seemingly anything can happen, where rules of logic no longer apply, and any desolate North California town could be controlled by a coven of Irish witches whose plan involves a television jingle and Halloween masks.

Score: ?/10