Remember when two highly successful movies were made about a silent psychopath who killed people like it was his job* and followed it up with a movie about a sinister organization making Halloween masks stuffed with Stonehenge fragments that would activate when a commercial played, turning the mask wearer’s face into a sludge of snakes and spiders? Do you remember a scene when we saw snakes crawl out of the face of a child?
Do you also remember that the main character was a doctor who just walked around banging every woman in sight? Just every single woman. “Hello. I’m Dr. Daniel Challis, and…” They never got past that point. Boom. Sex. Just like that. Always like that.
Given that he was played by sex god Tom Atkins, I guess that’s not overly surprising.
Good. Because I also remember that. I remember all of that, all of the time.
Part of me wishes the film had taken off and turned the Halloween series into a horror anthology series. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the Halloween series (except for Resurrection, because I’m a rationally thinking human being), but the idea of a horror anthology series based around the season of Halloween intrigues me, especially if John Carpenter and Debra Hill stayed on to oversee all of it.
Then again, we would have lost out on Paul Rudd’s turn as Tommy Doyle and Danielle Harris’ young introduction to horror. We also would have lost out on H20, and that is unacceptable.
I have grown to love Halloween III, in part because it is such a strange chapter in a fairly straightforward slasher series. This movie came out in 1982, the same year as Friday the 13th 3D. Each of them was the third installment in their respective series, yet they could not be more different. I love that.
*Given the fact that Michael Myers was being ruled by a secret cabal of monks or whatever (The Curse of Michael Myers), I guess killing probably was, in fact, his job.