Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
After a terrified toy salesman is mysteriously attacked and brought to the hospital, clutching the year's most popular Halloween mask, Dr. Daniel Challis sets out to investigate the strange events and finds himself thrust into a nightmarish conspiracy.
Halloween III is a genuinely singular entry in horror history — a bold, arguably reckless attempt to pivot the Halloween franchise into an anthology series, ditching Michael Myers entirely for a bizarre conspiracy involving Stonehenge megaliths, sinister Silver Shamrock masks, and a cult plot to sacrifice children on Halloween night. Its Novelty is legitimately exceptional: no major franchise horror film of its era attempted anything quite this strange or audacious. The plot is pulpy and riddled with logic holes, and the acting is functional at best — Tom Atkins is likeable but the script gives him little to work with. John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's synthesizer score is atmospheric and the cinematography is competent genre work with some effective dread. The ending, with its bleak, unresolved nihilism and that maddening jingle looping into the credits, is genuinely unsettling and memorable, elevating an otherwise clunky third act. Maligned on release for not being a Michael Myers film, it has rightly gained cult appreciation for its sheer weirdness and ambition.