Halloween 3

Halloween 3, some will be surprised to learn, has nothing to do with the popular horror franchise or the two films that preceded it. Michael Myers and slashers in a general sense do NOT appear in this weird, pseudo-supernatural techno-thriller with Tom "Creepshow" Atkins playing Dr. Shelling, and the lovely Stacy Nelkin as "Ellie Grimbridge," town people who travel to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California, which is a factory town producing a single product: a trio of Halloween Masks called "Silver Shamrock" (the town is populated and run by Irish immigrants).

Shellig is an alcoholic during a divorce with the equally lovely Nancy Kyes (from the first and second Halloween movies), and he is called to the hospital to attend to a patient who was brought in from a local gas station after being chased by a mysterious man in a black suit. This is Ellie's father, and he was brought in still clutching his Silver Shamrock mask.

Ellie's father is murdered in the middle of the night by having his eyes gouged out by another mysterious sort of MIB (like Men in Black from UFO lore), who then self-immolates by blowing himself up in his car. End of Act 1.

Act 2 sees the doctor and Ellie going to Santa Mira to get some clues about what happened to her father. They have sex (of course) in the hotel room and meet both a woman who has her mouth mysteriously and grotesquely lasered and an obnoxious Middle-Class family who sells Silver Shamrock masks. The town was founded by "Conal Cochran" (Dan O'Herlihy), who is "one of the richest men in the world," for selling Johnson Smith-style jokes, tricks, and novelties. He founded the factory, and "made the town what it is."

Earlier, we have seen that one of the stones of Stonehenge has been "stolen" (!) according to a news report on TV. The news report goes right into the psychopathic technoid jingle of the Silver Shamrock mask commercials, which feature a child's face against a black background before turning into a Silver Shamrock mask. The music consists of a sung jingle over two synth notes that could drive the listener insane if listened to for any great length of time.

But kids love it.

Atkins and Nelkin, posing as husband and wife, root around the weird, crypto-totalitarian Santa Mira (there is even a loudspeaker announcing a curfew), and the weird MIB continue to kill: pulling off the head of a too-loud vagrant, for one, and for some reason bringing to mind Phantasm and even The Stepford Wives in their cyborg-like lack of feeling and their relentless silence.

We do not wish to give away the entire film, of course. Suffice it to say, the "Silver Shamrock" is a plot to appease "Samhain", the "Lord of the Dead," by Cochran, a true believer who collects mysterious old 18th-century automatons, and who comes across as charming, dapper, and evil. Some androids bleed slimy goop, and the aforementioned lasered mouth is quite gross; heads both human and non-human go rolling around all over the place.

A Halloween mask melts on a child's face, releasing a torrent of roaches, eels, and even a fat cobra. What is going on here? Mass ritual sacrifice, in case you hadn't guessed.

And a need to stop those damn advertising jingles. NOW. They're on THREE DIFFERENT CHANNELS. And, at the very least, just listening to them would be enough to send the average man or woman bonkers. C.I.A. take note: You could tie someone down and use them for interrogation purposes.

(But, I do question that if you were running such jingles in an attempt at "mass domination," would you only run them on ...THREE CHANNELS? But, it was, like 1982 or something.)

On the whole a bloody good time, if rather trite in its plot points, Halloween 3 is a blast from the cable TV past, a film I remember well watching as a youngster, with its movie poster of the tall silhouettes of trick-or-treaters outlined against a blazing red California sunset. Eerie. I can almost still taste the huge, diabetes-inducing glut of Halloween candy as I eagerly and breathlessly tuned into the saga of Silver Shamrock and Halloween 3.

Trick or treat. (But, you'll complain, it's only FEBRUARY!)