Season's Greetings

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
directed by Tommy Lee Wallace
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Silly at times, but at its best, pretty great. Tommy Lee Wallace was editor and production designer on The Fog and Halloween. It feels like everyone knew how the game worked by 1982, and it was time for Wallace to take the family car for a spin. So Dean Cundey is still on camera (you know right away, with the first elegant Steadicam troll backwards through the hallways of a hospital), John Carpenter and Alan Howarth are still making great music (you can't tell me the intersection of sound and technology in Season of the Witch wasn't "instrumental" to David Lynch), and Jamie Lee Curtis's boyfriend from The Fog - Tom Atkins - is still doing his best as the great, gruff Carpenter stand-in. It's as much the synthesizer sounds synchronized to an effectively animated computer pumpkin as the kids trick-or-treating across the country in a montage straight from the Dance of Death - which is to say inimitable low-budget movie-making.

Happy Halloween, everyone.