Horror Movie Month - Halloween III: Season of the Witch

In ancient times...
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people... the Druids

No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge

[...]

And where are they now?
The little children of Stonehenge 
And what would they say to us?
If we were here... tonight

(Spinal Tap; Stonehenge)

Well, according to the events of this movie, the Druids moved to America, started up a wildly successful Halloween mask company, then secretly shipped one of the Stonehenge slabs over to an underground lab so they could chip bits off it to insert into their masks as part of a ritual to kill millions of children when they tuned into the Silver Shamrock Halloween 'show' on Halloween night while wearing said masks.

Yes, really.

After Halloween II, John Carpenter had the idea that each year a new Halloween film would be released, each with a different Halloween-themed story and none of them featuring Michael Myers from the first two films. Halloween III: Season of the Witch was the result of this idea, and after that they just decided to being Myers back again, which probably tells you most of what you need to know about this film.

I guess the nicest things that can be said about it is that it's certainly a memorable movie, and it at least has an original story (Nigel Kneale of the Quatermass TV serieses, among others, was the original writer until he sued to have his name removed because of how violent he felt the movie was). Other than that... I can only imagine that there were mind-altering substances involved during some of the film's shooting. Evil druids, okay. Evil druids owning a Halloween mask company, okay. Evil druids owning a Halloween mask company who want to use said masks to sacrifice millions of children on Halloween as a return to the old ways... okay, I'm still with you, just. Evil druids owning a Halloween mask company who want to use said masks to sacrifice millions of children on Halloween as a return to the old ways who have stolen part of Stonehenge and are using it to create microchips that, when activated in the masks, cause spiders and snakes to materialise out of nowhere and fill the masks to kill the children and anyone around them... yeah, now I've got to stop you there.

Oh, and there are androids too. I forgot to mention the androids. They're druid androids.

The main character of this film, a doctor who accidentally stumbles onto the druids' plans when an ER patient who had been ranting about the dangers of the masks gets his skull pulled apart by a mysterious man who then gets into a car, explodes and leaves only mechanical parts behind (bet you can't guess what the twist is there...) spends most of the movie investigating the Silver Shamrock company, only to quickly get captured. In the end this saves him quite a bit of time as the head druid ("Conal Cochran", just to make it really clear that the man owning a company called Silver Shamrock is Irish) is only too happy to tell the doctor everything and even give him a guided tour of the facilities before leaving him alone in a room and shoddily tied to a chair. But will the doctor escape in time to stop the druids' plans, and then stop a TV ad from going out on all channels across the country at the same time? And just how did they get that slab from Stonehenge without anyone noticing? 

(Actually, considering that in the 1980s the British countryside around Stonehenge was apparently full of people making crop circles overnight and no-one noticed them, I could very well see an evil corporation of druids pulling up with a big moving truck one night, swapping a slab out for a styrofoam fake and driving off with no-one being the wiser.)

This is most definitely a movie to watch with friends while drunk, or giving it the MST3K treatment, or both. Probably both.