The few patrons that dignified "Halloween III: Season Of The Witch" with purchased tickets when it premiered in theaters twenty years ago this month must have been shocked not to see Michael Myers go into another teen slashing spree. Instead "Halloween" creators John Carpenter & Debra Hill, along with writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace (editor, production designer and stand-in in every Carpenter flick made in the 1970’s and 1980’s), decided to sideline Myers and go with an all new story set between October 23rd and 31st of the present (circa 1982). It focuses on Dr. Daniel Challis ("The Fog’s" Tom Atkins), a doctor whose marriage is on the fritz because of a problem with alcohol that threatens to alienate him from his ex-wife and two children. One night an old man is brought to the hospital by a good Samaritan; clutching very tightly a Halloween mask and unable to speak, this man’s skull is crushed a few hours later by a well-dressed assassin (Dick Warlock) that burns himself up in the hospital’s parking lot a few minutes later. Shocked and surprised, Dr. Challis partners with the assassinated old man’s daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) and together drive to the California town of Santa Mira.

Home of the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory that manufactures Halloween masks (and apparently advertises on radio and TV every hour of every day on every station), Daniel and Ellie gradually discover a horrifying secret. The factory’s owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy, the Omni Corp. chairman in the first two "Robocop" movies), is a mad man that is trying to unleash a massive apocalypse into the world via transistors on the backs of the masks that have been implanted with molecules of a cursed Stonehendge rock stolen from England (!). When every kid in America tunes in to the big giveaway the company’s been advertising for 9:00PM on October 31st, a subliminal signal in the TV commercial will cause the kids wearing Shamrock masks to implode and decompose into zillions of deadly bugs and snakes. Cochran, acting as the villain of a James Bond movie, shows an imprisoned Dr. Challis his laughably under-equipped headquarters and a demonstration of how effective his marriage of technology, witchcraft and mask manufacturing is by turning a young boy (and his family) into Orkin men fodder. Time’s ticking on the night of October 31st as Challis has to somehow (a) free himself from the maniac’s minions, (b) save Ellie, (c) put an end to Cochran’s mad plan, (d) prevent his own children from wearing the Shamrock masks they have and (e) consume a whole quart of Wild Turkey.

OK, that last part about Wild Turkey is bullshit but come on! An evil Irish toy maker (with an army of human-like robots at his disposal) who wants to melt the heads of millions of American children into bug-ridden carcasses at the struck of 9PM? And the hero is a no-talent puffy doctor that wouldn’t look out of place in an Alcoholics Anonymous drunk tank? Holy cow, what’s not to love? If anything "Halloween III" suffers from not having a big-enough budget to back-up its imaginative and far-out premise. It also suffers from a laughably-incompetent performance by Tom Atkins as everyday hero Daniel Challis. Atkins was fine as a supporting performer in Carpenter’s "The Fog," but as the guy that desperately tries to save the world in "Halloween III" he’s too bland and anonymous an on-screen presence. Dan ‘behave yourselves’ O’Herlihy overacts a bit too much as mad villain Conal Cochran, but the movie’s tongue-in-cheek enough to give the man a scene in which he claps Dr. Challis for foiling his evil plans. Stacey Nelkin is serviceable as Atkins’ love interest and partner in solving the riddle behind Silver Shamrock’s masks, while everyone else in the cast of unknowns is just a few community college theater plays shy of being serviceable.

In a weird way the lack of standout performances only serves to enhance the peculiarity of "Halloween III’s" storyline, forcing the viewer not to sympathize with a particular character but to pay attention to the movie itself. "Halloween III" follows a few horror genre rules, like the one about young people having pre-marital sex signaling their having to suffer the consequences. But it twists it around so that the two lead characters (both middle-aged) suffer the consequences for being intimate via Dr. Challis’ ex-wife refusing to throw away the Shamrock masks when he calls home to tell her they’re evil. Talk about irony: if Challis doesn’t lie to his ex-wife to go investigate things around Santa Mira then his children would have probably died due to exposure to the sinister corporation’s masks. But, by going there and shacking up with Ellie, the good doctor neglected his ex-wife and poisoned her mind into ignoring Challis’ pleas to save their own children’s lives. "Halloween III" also shares some odd parallels with David Cronenberg’s 1983 flick "Videodrome" about technology’s influence and TV’s reach into everyday American life, but writer/director Wallace injects enough fantasy and sorcery myth into his movie to give it its own sense or urgency and eerie believability.

Fans of Carpenter’s late 70’s/early 80’s work will see in this flick truckloads of in-jokes that make repeated viewings a delight. Example: the big TV attraction leading up to the 9:00PM hour in which the deadly TV spot will wipeout the mask-wearing kids is John Carpenter’s own "Halloween," and in some scenes that movie’s soundtrack plays as "Halloween III’s" own soundtrack (via an on-screen TV) as a weird attempt to subliminally imply that the former is just make-believe while the latter is for real. Also look for the Cochran assassin that kills Mr. Grimbridge in the hospital at the start of the movie; he’s played by stuntman Dick Warlock, who played Michael Myers in the second "Halloween" movie (which, at least theoretically, means that Myers is in "Halloween III" via the man that played him on-screen the year before). The final scene of the movie hints at an apocalyptic conclusion in which Cochran may have gotten away with his plans of killing millions of innocent people (mostly children), leaving open to interpretation the possibility that evil triumphs in the end and has wiped out a sizable slice of Earth’s population. Michael Myers would have a hard time matching this prodigious body count tally in even his hardest-working cinematic killing sprees!

What ultimately makes "Halloween III" click with a small cottage of fans that love it to death (yours truly included) are: (a) its marriage of traditional horror clichés (cheap scares galore), (b) gory deaths (eight on-camera, excluding robots and the millions of viewers that allegedly die at the end) and (c) a healthy disregard for audience expectations about what the third chapter in a horror trilogy should be. I can only imagine people’s reactions when they went to see this back in 1982 and gradually realized that Michael Myers wouldn’t be flashing his knife this time around. Come into it with an open mind, and "Halloween III" might surprise you with its fantastic modern day tales of witchcraft and fantasy that has held remarkably well through the years (outdated evil lair technology notwithstanding). At the very least be prepared to have the movie’s endlessly repeated TV jingle (’Happy Happy Halloween, Halloween... Silver Shamrock’) stuck in your head for the rest of your natural life.