(1982) ****
I'm not sure what made everyone in the 80s decide that this wasn't a good movie. Whatever criticism one might have of
Season Of The Witch, it's undeniably got a vibe. It feels chilly and autumnal like its two predecessors. There's something new here though: loneliness. The latter half of the movie takes place in Santa Mira -- Loleta, CA in real life, not even big enough to warrant being called a "town". It's a "census designated
place" on the California coast hundreds of miles from Sacramento and from Portland. The sense of isolation comes out in the establishing shots. Also, the Santa Mira streets are almost completely empty, the townspeople regarding with suspicion the new car driving around town. The John Carpenter synth plays an 80s dirge in the background. Santa Mira feels like a sad, ageless silence has set into its bones. It's a moment where good location scouting, good cinematography, and good scripting really come together.
I also don't have any particular problem with the cast, though male lead Tom Atkins has always been one of those actors that I grew up thinking was my parent's idea of an important actor, like Woody Allen, but whose significance was lost on me as a child. I am old enough now to know that I wasn't missing the magic. He's not bad in this at all; he's just kind of "a guy". It's not his fault. He's fine. On the other hand, Dan O'Herlihy (the chairman of OCP in
Robocop) is stern, sly, and scary, and almost all of the best lines in the script come from him. On his way out the door in one scene, he promises cryptically that tomorrow will be a special day. "Being a medical man, you should find it interesting".
There's three minor tragedies that stem from the fact that this is the third movie in the
Halloween franchise. The first is that John Carpenter really didn't want to write a sequel to the first film, and wound up, in his words, "with a lot of beer, sitting in front of a typewriter saying 'What the fuck am I doing? I don't know.'" The result was
Halloween II, a sequel none of the Carpenter crew was enthusiastic about, and the critical response at the time reflected this. The second is that the confusing switch in narrative from the Michael Myers storyline opened this sequel up to a lot more scorn than it fairly deserved.
The third, and I think most frustrating of the three, is that the poor critical response to
Season Of The Witch wrecked any opportunity for the Carpenter crew to do what they actually wanted, which was to create an anthology franchise. The problem with
Season Of The Witch isn't that it came out third, but that
Halloween II came out at all. I can imagine an alternate universe in which
this was the second movie, and the Carpenters are just that much more invested in it, making a movie that's just enough better than this to make it stick, spawning a franchise that tells a completely different story with every film. If nothing else, Carpenter himself might have stuck around to make more Halloween movies. None of the movies between this and 2018 feature the Carpenters in any way, and it shows.
There's three minor tragedies that stem from the fact that this is the third movie in the Halloween franchise. The first is that John Carpenter really didn't want to write a sequel to the first film, and wound up, in his words, "with a lot of beer, sitting in front of a typewriter saying 'What the fuck am I doing? I don't know.'" The result was Halloween II, a sequel none of the Carpenter crew was enthusiastic about, and the critical response at the time reflected this. The second is that the confusing switch in narrative from the Michael Myers storyline opened this sequel up to a lot more scorn than it fairly deserved.
2 comments:
I liked Tom Atkins more than, say Octopunk liked Thomas Jane in The Mist. I thought about this line in O's review while I was deciding what to write about TA.
"Thomas Jane is just a dud. You don't think so at first -- he seems fine, he's tall and good looking, he's likeable. But after seeing him in The Mist and HBO's Hung and realizing I'd seen him in Deep Blue Sea and immediately forgotten him, I've come to learn that Thomas Jane does not possess the charisma necessary to be a leading man. Which is too bad, because he's the main character in all those things I just mentioned, including the movie that I instantly forgot he was in.
(Like... while I was still watching it even.)
He's a zero. Likeable, but you come to feel like he's wasting your time. Like maybe a small Easter Island head in a gray sweater might be just as good in that role. And now that you mention it, maybe that's what you got."
That's a lot of shade thrown on Mr. Jane!
He finally did a role that I liked, as Detective Miller on the show The Expanse. I think he finally aged enough.
Excellent review, dude. I've always liked this flick but its place in the franchise is pretty strange.
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