Halloween III: Season of the Witch (R)
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This came out in 1982, and I first saw it in 2024 (on Halloween). It's a departure from the storyline of the first two movies, as the "Halloween" franchise was originally meant to be an annual anthology with unrelated stories. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), this movie did quite poorly, so the anthology idea was abandoned after this. Now that I've seen it, I can say that I didn't much care for it, but even so, I'd rather they had tried something different with every movie, instead of just bringing back Michael Myers again and again and again.

It starts on the night of October 23. A man is running from men who apparently want to kill him. He manages to get to like a gas station or whatever, before he collapses. He's taken to the hospital, but one of the men who were after him shows up and kills him, then goes outside and blows himself up in his car. The attending doctor, Dan Challis, is curious about what's really going on, and he meets the dead man's daughter, Ellie Grimbridge, who also wants to find out why her father was killed. Together, they go to the town of Santa Mira, where there's a Halloween mask factory run by a man named Conal Cochran. Well, lots of stuff happens that's too boring to go into, but Ellie is abducted on Halloween and brought to the factory, and Dan follows. He uncovers an insidious plot that's absolutely bonkers, and tries to stop it, as well as trying to rescue Ellie.

I don't want to reveal any more of the plot, and I've left out a lot of details and some characters. Most of the movie didn't appeal to me at all, but there were some things toward the end that I kind of liked (just enough to raise my rating from "meh" to "meh and a quarter"). I'm not wild about the very end, which is ambiguous. And I didn't particularly care for any of the characters. But the movie wasn't a complete bust, I guess. Most of it wasn't really scary at all, but Cochran's plan was pretty damn disturbing, and I guess sort of interesting. But it's all just ridiculous. I mean, for feck's sake, one of the stones from Stonehenge is involved. And despite the title, the movie doesn't have anything to do with witches, really. Anyway, I don't know what else to say.

Followed by Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers