7. Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982)
Expectation: After slicing and stabbing his way through Illinois,will a coven help Michael Myers to finally catch the ones who got away, twice: teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and psychiatrist Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance)?
Reality: No Michael Myers. No Laurie Strode. No Samuel Loomis. And, indeed, no witches. Instead, there are insects, snakes, androids, creepy men in suits and one bloke who sets himself on fire. Considering the above, its position among the
Halloween franchise is, unsurprisingly, very much up for debate. Director Tommy Lee Wallace throws out the gore we've come to love and replaces it with a plot so convoluted you can see why they've had to rope in a cast of relatively unknown character actors. The story concerns a shipment of masks that, once they've left the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in California, are found to contain microchips (which themselves contain fragments of Stonehenge, naturally) that, when activated, kill the wearers in an inexplicable cloud of snakes and spiders. And why not? Given the film's poor reception, normal business was resumed seven years later with
Halloween 4: The Return of MichaelMyers.
That subtitle's not a threat, it's an assurance.