The Halloween Project: Halloween III

This is our third day into the project (check out recaps of Halloween and Halloween II) and we’re about to recap Halloween III: Season of the Witch. It doesn’t get more nuanced or complex than this. I spoke to a resident film buff named Brock who told me that originally, the plan was for each Halloween film to have a different theme/story but that Michael Myers was so popular, he became the recurring villain. Season of the Witch is the only departure from the Mike Myers saga. So. excited. Hold onto your face masks, this gets complicated.*

*SPOILER WARNING

Photo credit

A crazy old dude with a Halloween mask is admitted to the hospital and treated for injuries before he is killed by evil zombie/robot men in suits. The doctor who treats him, Daniel Challis, has a moustache. This is how you know he will be a main character. Dr. Moustache already has lots of problems, mainly that he is an alcoholic and that his ex-wife hates him and doesn’t want him to see his kids. But when Dr. Moustache meets crazy old dude’s daughter, Ellie (we’ll just call her Barely Legal), he decides he doesn’t have enough on his plate, what with the whole being a doctor and having a moustache thing, and so he and Barely Legal decide to investigate the death of her father. This, they decide, is obviously related to the cheap Halloween mask he is wearing from some placed called the Silver Shamrock Novelty Company. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention…John Carpenter hates Irish people. Dr. Moustache and Barely Legal drive out to the factory town of Santa Mira and check into a kitschy motel where they proceed to have weirdly edited, oddly censored 80’s love scenes. In the end, it turns out that the factory is a cover for an old Irish witch-druid dude named Colonel Cochran, who is nothing like his fellow officer, Colonel Sanders. Somehow Cochran has stolen Stonehenge and installed it in his factory. You’ll never guess how he did it! No, really. You’ll never guess. He says that and then he never, ever explains himself. When all the children of the world turn on their televisions for the Silver Shamrock Corporation’s big broadcast event, they will put on their masks, which are somehow linked via computer chip to…Stonehenge…and this…makes their heads explode and spiders and snakes crawl out of their eye sockets (it’s like your mom said, tv will rot your brain). What is Colonel Cochran’s reason for this nefariousness? Does he need a reason? No, really. He wants to know and then no one is able to answer him so he’s like, “This is an ancient sacrificial blood rite on the holiday of Samhain” (because, as we learned in Halloween II, Samhain is the Irish tradition whereupon we kill children and/or sexy teenagers because that’s the Gaelic way! Kiss us, we’re Irish!) and Dr. Moustache is all like tormented and sad and also apparently has 49 minutes before the broadcast so he foot-smashes the television set and escapes into the air ducts and rescues Barely Legal and they dump mask devices on the robots and on Colonel Cochran and this makes all their heads explode. And then Barely Legal and Dr. Moustache drive away while cartoon orange flames light up the night sky (because the factory is now on fire, did I forget to mention that part?). But OMG HUUUUUUUUUGE TWIST, BARELY LEGAL HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A ROBOT BY THE LATE COLONEL COCHRAN AND SHE IS TRYING TO STRANGLE DR. MOUSTACHE! It’s cool, though, because he whacks off her head with a tire iron and gets back in his car but OMG, HE FORGOT THAT HER DISLOCATED ARM IS IN THE PASSENGER SEAT AND IT CAN STILL STRANGLE HIM SOMEHOW! So then he throws it. And it’s all okay. And then he goes to a gas station and somehow convinces the Head of All Television Everywhere that they can’t air the big Silver Shamrock Corporation Broadcast of Doom because it will kill all the children and they totally believe him and cancel the broadcast except OMG THEY TOTALLY FORGOT THE THIRD CHANNEL (THERE ARE ONLY THREE) AND THERE ARE CHILDREN AND THEY ARE WATCHING THIS AND DR. MOUSTACHE IS LIKE, TURN IT OFF YOU HAVE TO TURN IT OFF TURN IT OFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!! Bam. Credits.

Is your mind as blown as mine is right now? Gaelic Halloween spiders!!?! Side note: some internet research is telling me that the villain’s name is actual Conal Cochran, not Colonel Cochran but I, a) heard colonel not conal, and b) like my version better. Halloween IV…Thursday…be there….

love, elizabeth