Halloween III, subtitled Season of the Witch, was a 1982 movie starring Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O'Herlihy, and Michael Currie. The movie was written by John Carpenter and produced by Carpenter and Debra Hill, who made the first two Halloween movies. This movie was an effort by John Carpenter to make a series of movies under the Halloween banner without the character of Michael Myers character (aside from when a clip from Halloween featuring Michael was playing on TV in the background of one of the scenes). It was a total flop, and hence the series of movies never developed and the studio went on to make multiple movies with Michael Myers as the central character that ranged from pretty good, to incredibly stupid without Carpenter's involvement.
There have been multiple releases on physical media, some of which have an extensive amount of extras. The original DVD release, however, is very bare-bones. It just contains the movie itself and does not have a commentary track or behind-the-scenes material that would come later with the blu-ray release.
I think this movie was doomed as soon as they tried to put the Halloween label on it. By then the Michael Myers character was synonymous with Halloween movies and anything that did not have him in it was never going to be given a shot. Personally, I think Carpenter should have just promoted it under his name and not given it the Halloween title (something even the people involved admit). Had the movie just been titled "John Carpetner's Season of the Witch" or something like that, they could have released the exact same movie and it probably would have done better at the box office and the series would have probably produced more than one film.
As just a horror movie and ignoring the Halloween title, I thought it was good, but not great. Given when it was made and the fact that it was made on a shoestring budget without any big-name actors, the writing and special effects were kind of cheesy, and it has the look and feel of a low-budget horror movie. Even so, it definitely has that creepy factor that any good horror movie has. The storyline was very weird and the story did not (and still will not) appeal to everyone. The crux of the story was basically a company making haunted Halloween masks that when worn when a particular commercial came on would kill the person wearing it. It also had killer androids that would do the bad guy's dirty work. While there are certainly better horror movies out there, if you are a fan of the genre, and are ok with an offbeat out there kind of storyline and the lack of Michael Myers you may want to check this out.
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