Quote:
Originally Posted by ianungstad
Oh, I love a well crafted genre film but Halloween III is just stupid. The premise is that these kids all across America are going to sit in front of their tv sets at 9:00 pm for a television special and put on these Halloween masks which will kill them. Of course this makes no sense at all as the US covers multiple time zones and while it may be 9 pm in Northern California, it's already 1am on the East Coast where certainly there would not be children huddled around their tv sets.
One of the things you always see in a lousy movie is when the protagonist is captured by the villian and the villian has to explain his evil plan in a long winded monologue to the hero (and to the viewers) so that the movie makes some kind of sense.
In this case the hero is captured, taken to the factory and then given a guided tour (why?) of the "final proccessing" portion of the plant and is told in depth details about the master plan, what will happen and how it will be accomplished (why?) before being conveniently left alone to plan and execute his escape.
There are plenty of movies that I don't like but I would never call them awful. Just because I couldn't connect to a film doesn't mean that I can't see it's merits. Halloween III is an awful movie because it was just a combination of poor elements from acting, script, directing. Taste is subjective but craft is not.
I would guess Scream acquired this title because they saw some easy profits from the Halloween brand. They have a number of wonderful films coming up that I'm really looking forward to.
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But you like
THEY LIVE (better), which you pretty much sum up with the bold lines above.
Even with that said, no one (including myself) expects ANYone to like anything I do. If you hate it, meh, not a problem. Like I say to my friends if they like something I don't, that's why you'll buy the blu-ray and I won't.
Regardless, let's at least address a few of those points you make, regardless of convincing you that
HALLOWEEN III is better than you currently feel about it. So here we go!:
POINT 1 - The Premise: whether the commercial was playing at the same time around the country or just on the west coast, the bottom line is that a lot of kids would be dying from watching the commercial regardless of how much land it covered. Also consider that in the early to mid 1980's parents DID let their kids stay up pretty late on Halloween... I remember frequently staying out until 1:00 AM collecting candy with my 5 to 10 friend group patrolling the entire subdivision. Granted, I lived in the suburbs where it was pretty safe (no drive-bys that I know of), but you get the picture.
Also keep in mind that the commercials frequently mentioned "the big giveaway", and as any kid from the 1970's and '80's can tell you, there was nothing funner than running home to watch
SPACE:1999 or
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (otherwise known as STAR WARS: THE TV SHOW) which played at a specific time, or any number of James Bond movies that ABC or CBS would play once a year (so if you missed it you were S.O.L.). The bottom line here being: if something like candy and/or money is being promised to be given away, with the results being displayed on a commercial played at a specific time when there were only 5 to 10 channels on the TV, there is something specific to 1970's and '80's suburban US culture where the parents (or at least mine) would wake their kids up just to see it together.
The bottom line is that what made the premise scary (to myself) is that you have a villain who just wants to kill kids for no other reason than just to cause pain from in essence a trick pulled on the parents, who commercialized a holiday created from a sacrificial ritual. No world conquest; no billions of dollars... just a trick to play on the children.
I thought Cochran was pretty clear about that one.
PREMISE 2 - the villain explaining the plot: This I thought was fairly clever too. Hokey? Maybe. But I got to thinking... Cochran was playing a joke on Dr. Challis. Remember, the doc had 2 kids of his own, and Dr. Challis knew his kids had Silver Shamrock masks.
The way I look at it is: Cochran gave Dr. Challis a chance to escape and achieve a "happy ending" by giving him the chance to win. Remember Cochran's plan to begin with (a trick to cause suffering on the world, not out of some childhood trauma, but just for the hell of it.. hell, just for the FUN of it)... I believe he WANTED Challis to escape/"win" just so he could go home and find his children dead. Dr. Challis was the witness to not just see what would happen but know what was coming. What better hell could he give Challis but a false sense of hope just to find his prodigy dead? Considering that Cochran was dead/dematerialized by the stonehenge piece (much less the entirity of the Silver Shamrock factory going up with him), how could Dr. Challis get revenge? Like the end to
SEVEN, the doctor would be left alive and with nothing to live for, and no one to lash out against.
Same thing goes for Ellie being the robot, and waiting to attack him until AFTER they leave the town (maybe that was part of her programming). Even so, she should have been able to kill him pretty quickly considering how easily the prior robots pulled off the bum's head and pulled out Ellie's father's nosebridge. I thought that maybe she was programmed to give a good enough fight to drive Dr. Challis to destroy her (and realize that she was dead) but again to allow him to live long enough to see/hear the results of Cochran's work. In the end,
it was all done for him.