Halloween III surprised audiences when it came along. There was no Micheal Myers, which had already become synonymous with the holiday, and there was a strange combination of the supernatural and science fiction in the third entry in the franchise.

A convoluted behind-the-scenes story affected the script and the filming, and with no Micheal, the film seemed doomed to failure. It has since gone on to become a cult favourite and despite the science fiction element I really enjoyed this one.

Halloween is coming, and Silver Shamrock seems to have the holiday locked up when it comes to selling masks – they’ve got a witch, a skeleton and a pumpkin head, they’re all the rage, and Silver Shamrock is going all out to promote it. There’s even a televised giveaway planned for Halloween itself.

But there’s something more insidious going on as Tom Atkins’ Dr. Daniel Challis finds out one evening when a raving patient is murdered in his hospital. As he investigates the womanizing (which may or may not have been the cause of his divorce) doctor discovers strange things are going on at the Silver Shamrock warehouse which is run in Santa Mira by Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy).

Cochran’s company has stolen a plinth from Stonehenge, apparently with magical properties, and the masks have been teched out that when the circuitry is activated it kills the wearer, and releases all manner of bugs, worms, and snakes. Ugh.

Cochran is calling this a big trick he’s playing on all the children, and he and his compatriots are using this as a chance to rid the world of children because…?

And that’s all well and good, but then we learn that a number of the employees, and the locals in Santa Mira aren’t even human, their android. The rest of the world is still using dial-up phones and fossil fuels but Cochran is somehow able to make life-life robots and hasn’t made a mint off of that? That’s the part of the story that really bothers me.

Sure, he was a toy maker, and has an inate understanding of gears and mechanisms but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

Challis is investigating with Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) the daughter of the patient who was murdered, and he also gets a flirt on with a pathologist and it seems like there’s a romantic history there as well. Man this guy gets around.

Neither Daniel nor Ellie are prepared for what they find at the Silver Shamrock, and with the big Halloween giveaway happening in just a few hours, televised across the nation, can Daniel stop it in time and save the children of America, including his own?

John Carpenter and Alan Howarth deliver another tingling score, but it’s that ad jingle that stays in your mind and just won’t leave. And all three films have been lensed by that fantastic director of photography, Dean Cundey!

The film didn’t do as well as Universal wanted, and everyone but Carpenter it seems, wanted Micheal back. So Carpenter sold the rights and walked away from the series until the night he came back…