In the interest of completeness, it's necessary to include this 1982 feature directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. And John Carpenter, you ask? He's behind the synthesizer keyboard with Alan Howarth, creating the musical score -- probably the most memorable element of this film.
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The problem with Season Of The Witch is not so much the movie itself. It's that it calls itself Halloween. Carpenter's enthusiasm for this project was in the idea that the Halloween title could continue to engender new and unrelated tales of the macabre that would center around October 31st. And that would be fine, if not that the established Michael Myers franchise hadn't already built in an audience, a backstory, and an expectation for closure to the current Halloween plotline.
This isn't to say the Season Of The Witch is a bad film; in fact, it's acceptable. The story here has a diabolical toymaker named Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy) attempting to flood the market with interactive toys that will cause violent death to the kids who play with them during the Halloween night broadcast on television. Blame the tomfoolery on the manufacture of a computer chip on each toy, and this chip contains an element derived from a mysterious rock (not unlike Britain's Stonehenge), the powers of which are being harvested by the toymaker.
On the good-guy side, there is Dr. Challis (Tom Atkins) and his girlfriend Ellie (Stacey Nelkin). Once they cotton onto Cochran's evil-doings, they take action to thwart the doctor's agenda. Speaking of the mad doctor, one of his henchmen (blink and you'll miss him) is played by none other than Dick Warlock, who played Michael Myers is Halloween 2. And to further establish a very loose line of congruency, one scene shows characters in a bar watching John Carpenter's original Halloween on the television.
Deficiencies notwithstanding, the results make for a fairly entertaining movie, if we can forgive the faux pas in the title. This is not a true Halloween movie, by any stretch. Nor is it a great horror film. It's an okay one. And since it's got the Halloween name in the title, it's grudgingly featured here. Thankfully, Dwight Little gave us a real follow-up six years later, with his hands-down superior Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers.
