The odd Halloween movie out. The black sheep of the series. The one that still has people confused and wandering the streets at all hours with a puzzled look on their face. The one about the evil Irish businessman who sells killer Halloween masks created with black magic from one of the Stonehenge rocks. The one without Jamie Lee Curtis or Donald Pleasence or Michael Myers or any other masked slashers.
The big idea here is that producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to turn the Halloween movies into a horror anthology series a la a cinematic Tales from the Crypt. After all, they unmistakably killed most of the pivotal series characters in Halloween II. And this was the 80s. It wasn’t 1943 anymore, when you could blow up The Frankenstein Monster at the end of a movie and then bring him back intact next year to tangle with The Wolf Man again. Audiences had become more sophisticated, right?
Nope. Horror filmmakers eventually figured out that people in contemporary times were perfectly happy to see their psycho slashers die and then come back over and over again in the movies. Take your stupid killer Halloween masks and get outta town. This film bombed and Michael Myers returned in Halloween 4.
As for the movie itself, it’s some likable lunacy and very underrated. None of it makes a lick of sense, but Dan O’Herlihy is perfect as an ultra-evil businessman and the film pulses with a memorable synthesizer score. There are also fine rubber prosthetic gore moments and good creep-outs with snakes and bugs.
Great British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale, creator of the Quatermass series, wrote the original draft of the screenplay and came up with the basic story. John Carpenter and director Tommy Lee Wallace rewrote his script and amped up the gore to such a degree that Kneale demanded that his name be removed from the credits.