CineFile Video

Plot outline: Mr. Freedom is a pro-America superhero who fights for God and Country by beating, robbing, raping and killing anyone who looks like they might disagree with him. When he hears that France is in danger of falling to the Commies, Mr. Freedom heads overseas to set things right. When the welcome he receives isn’t quite as warm as he expected, he gives up hope of steering the French away from the Reds and decides to salvage what he can by destroying the entire country

American ex-pat artist William Klein’s most prolific filmmaking period came in the mid-60s, after he abandoned his original medium of photography. The films he made during this period reflect his scathing political outlook and caustic sense of humor, both of which are overwhelmingly present in “Mister Freedom”, a nonstop gutbusting satire on American imperialism, which Michael Sullivan of The Unknown Movies accurately calls “the world of Sid and Marty Kroft filtered through the eyes of Stanley Kubrick.” Sullivan goes on to say:

“Admittedly, ‘Mister Freedom’ is at times pretentious, wrongheaded, and about as subtle as a jackhammer to the forehead. But it’s also a sometimes hilarious and unpredictable satire of imperialism in the guise of a superhero movie. It sometimes plays like an issue of Captain American written by Rush Limbaugh…[m]ixing pop art with ‘Mad Magazine’-style satire, ‘Mister Freedom’ is filled with larger than life costumes and sets, purposely overheated dialogue, and cartoonishly over the top characters. Because of this, it had the potential to turn into something shrill and obnoxious. But thankfully, Klein balances out the campier aspects with searing social commentary, and the cast knows when to rein themselves in and avoid becoming pathetic Charles Nelson Reilly clones…[a]side from the Roy Lichtenstein-like set design, the most memorable aspect of ‘Mister Freedom’ is John Abbey’s crazed performance in the titular role. Abbey truly threw himself into this character, and almost seems to relish doing things like beating up French tourists (and robbing them), forcing a maid to strip at gunpoint, and spouting hilariously nonsensical pro-American speeches (’You want a piano? Here you go. Want two pianos?’)”

Mister Freedom - “Balls!” speech (MP3)
Mister Freedom - end credits theme (MP3)

I distinctly remember this as the year it all changed. Now, you can count on a couple scraps of real entertainment (Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly), and nothing tooooo tasteless. Personally, I preferred the Oscars as a bloated atrocity. Now it’s just a chubby disgrace, not much to get your bile up.

With all this recent talk on this blog of cable TV memories, I thought I’d make some of the haziness a little more concrete. Here’s some audio from vintage HBO promos and bumpers that are sure to evoke some Pavlovian responses out of you —

HBO In Space (”Feature Presentation”): This is the “floating in space thing” that HBO would show before almost every single feature film, from sometime between 1983 and the late ’80s. There were three versions: the 60-second flying-through-the-cityscape-and-then-onto-the-floating-HBO-logo version, the 30-second space-only version, and the 70-second one that was a mirror of the 60-second one, only with a short scene of a family turning on the TV and sitting down (shot through a living room window) tacked onto the very beginning. The 30-second one is the one they showed most often, but here for download is the full 60-second version.

“HBO In Space” feature presentation bumper music (MP3)

HBO Movie bumper, late 1980s: This one’s got more plastic pompery, what with the neon glow and the shredding guitar solo. This one got heavy play up until sometime in the mid-’90s. Cinefile employee Damon instantly recognized what this was by name, after only hearing the first few seconds of it from across the store.

“HBO Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Movie Marquee & Coming Up Next On HBO, early 1980s: These go back a little further than I can remember. My family got cable in the household in ‘83, around the time the “HBO In Space” thing premiered.

“HBO Movie Marquee” feature presentation bumper music, early 1980s (MP3)
“Coming Up Next On HBO” bumper, early 1980s (MP3)

The Best Time On TV Is HBO, late 1980s(?): Someone in the HBO head offices must’ve absolutely loved the work of painter Piet Mondrian with a passion, for the graphic look that the channel adopted for almost a year reflected a direct rip-off of his aesthetic. Check out the faux pleasure with which the session singer nearly blows a load in his pants over HBO!

“The Best Time On TV Is HBO” promo, late 1980s (MP3)

HBO Video Jukebox, 1981-1986: According to Wikipedia, “a typical episode of ‘Video Jukebox’ consisted of seven or eight music videos and lasted roughly 30 minutes, and the lineup changed in the middle of each month…[i]n the late 1970s (and before the MTV network debuted), HBO was already airing one or two music videos (or ‘promotional clips’ as they were known at the time) as filler in between their feature films and other series. These short clips also carried the ‘Video Jukebox’ moniker. When Video Jukebox premiered as a half-hour series in December 1981, HBO reached more households than MTV (which was launched only four months earlier), so a video that aired on Video Jukebox actually received more exposure than it would on MTV, a claim that would be short-lived as MTV quickly gained more cable markets…[a]t the peak of its popularity in the mid-1980s, Video Jukebox spawned many ’special edition’, including Christmas Jukebox, Country Jukebox, Comedy Jukebox and other editions featuring songs from movies and Grammy winners.” Here’s the brief theme music from both versions of the show’s opening credits through its five-year run.

“HBO Video Jukebox” themes, 1981-1986 (MP3)

No Place Like HBO commercial, early 1980s: I don’t know if this saccharine jingle (done in the popular commercial spot style of the time) was something that only aired on HBO itself, or if it was on network TV at the time, in order to entice new customers to the then-burgeoning subscription service. Kenny Rogers makes a cameo appearance (visual only, not singing) in the montage of folks of various ethnicities plopping themselves down in front of a TV in order to regale themselves with entertainment from the likes of pay cable.

“No Place Like HBO” promo, early 1980s (MP3)

Inside HBO, early 1980s: At the time, most everyone was “new” to pay movie channels, so HBO thought it needed to explain to cable subscriber neophytes exactly how the laws of HBO physics worked. The channel produced a series of animated FAQ-style promo spots that answered such questions as “Why does HBO show things it’s shown before in the past?” and “Why does HBO show movies I haven’t heard of before?” Such questions seem ridiculously quaint now, in light of our current media culture avalanche. Here’s a montage of four of these “Inside HBO” question-answering spots.

“Inside HBO” montage, early 1980s (MP3)

Cinemax Movie bumper, late 1980s: Wikipedia sez: “Cinemax launched in August 1980, introduced by its then on-air personality Robert Kulp. Kulp told viewers that Cinemax would be about movies and nothing but movies. At the time, HBO featured a wider range of programming, including documentaries, children’s entertainment, sporting events, and entertainment specials…Movie classics were a mainstay of [Cinemax] at its birth, “all uncut and commercial-free” as Kulp would say. A heavy schedule of films from the 50s-70s made up most of Cinemax’s program schedule.” Cinemax was often way cooler than HBO for me as a child, mainly because they simply showed a better selection of stuff — AND had the Max Headroom talk show! I remember catching this particular bumper in front of movies that I would watch at a certain friend’s house as a kid; my parents had the HBO cable package, but never wanted to cough up the extra dough for Cinemax.

“Cinemax Movie” feature presentation bumper music, late 1980s (MP3)

name: Hadrian Belove, Cinefile owner
primary watching years:

“Blood Beach”: “That was a huge one, the first R-rated movie I ever saw. I was five. I saw it on the first trip I ever took to the east coast to visit my dad after the divorce, and we got back from the airport in the middle of the night, all tumbled into his bed and watched ‘Blood Beach.’ For years afterwards, when I was renting movies, I looked in vain for ‘the movie where the guy is buried to the waist in the sand, just pretending to be swallowed, flailing about, screaming,’ without knowing the title. It really captured my imagination.”

“From Beyond”: “This one’s a formative memory. I was totally disturbed by it, because at one point it made my highly aroused, and I went from that to being completely disgusted in one sitting. I’d have a boner, and then there’d be that scene where a hand sinks into flesh like it was pâté…”

“The Wanderers” & “The Warriors”: “I’ve always gotten these two confused. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen all of ‘The Wanderers’. I’ve seen the end and the middle numerous times. That’s a weird movie to come into the middle of, because it seems to exist in its own dimension, because it’s the ’50s. There’s all these specific gangs — just as in ‘The Warriors’ — like the shaved-head fat person gang. There’s that climactic fight on a football field, real violent. Like the opening of ‘Gangs Of New York’, but better.”

Disney films: “Then there’s all the Disney shit I never saw. They would taunt children with giving households The Disney Channel free for a week, but then then parents wouldn’t pay for it, so you’d only know about all these cartoons, like ‘The Sword In The Stone’, but you’d never get to see them, unless you rented them at the store. I didn’t watch them, but because of how vivid the commercials were for them on cable, my mind opened up and ’saw’ them.”

“Summer of Slasher Movies” on The Movie Channel: “This was during a summer I spent in Vermont with my dad, in ‘83 or ‘84? Maybe ‘82? The idea was that since it was the summer, The Movie Channel showed summer camp slasher movies for a few months. The only thing I remember, though, is the promo commercial they put toegther for it; it was an early mashup before its time. They took the Allan Sherman song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”, and set it to summer camp slasher clips, like having the moment in “Friday The 13th” where the girl gets grabbed into the lake from off the canoe over the line in the song that goes “And the lake has alligators…” If anyone can find a copy of this promo video, please let us know.”

Joe Bob Briggs: “Saturday nights at midnight on The Movie Channel. This was the smuttiest stuff the channel showed, like the British “Confessions” sex comedy series. Or Herschell Gordon Lewis, ‘Wizard of Gore’, ‘2000 Maniacs.’ Totally horrifying. ‘Wizard of Gore’ had primal horrifying action. I kept changing the channel and then going back, switching back in gruesome fascination.”

The Playboy Channel: “One month I randomly got The Playboy Channel for free at my dad’s Vermont house. It was like a gift from the gods to a 12-year-old, planned to happen the minute I discovered I was interested in sex, weirdly watching a girl getting eaten out while my sister was sleeping next to me. I remember waiting for my sister to go back to California, so I could have the room to myself to masturbate freely. I put headphones into the little TV my stepmother gave me (that was mounted at the lower edge of the trundle bed), with one earphone in my ear and the other hanging loose, so I could hear if my sister rustled. Ironically, within days of her leaving and my staying behind, I lost The Playboy Channel, and then I was reduced to looking at the scrambled TV signal. When I saw that similar scene in “American Pie”, I said “Yup, that’s one of my childhood memories I like to tell people”. What was even better was that Playboy was Channel 41 — and Channel 42 was an all-gray screen. On my Vermont cable system, all the pay channels had a gray screen that was one channel above them, with perfect audio. So basically I spent 7th grade sleeping through classes, because I’d been up ’till 3 in the morning, masturbating repeatedly, listening to the porn audio. Because of that and my bad eyesight, I still have a strong aural response to sex.”

more smut: “In my adolescence, I was also into basketball. I would flip back and forth between the porn and basketball — also, if someone came into the room while the porn was on, I could immediately switch to the basketball game with the button on the remote that took you back to the last channel you were on. I did this every time I heard a creak outside my door. I’m sure Tim Hardaway would be happy to know that I often watched Golden State Warriors games of his with an erect penis in my hand.

even more smut: I don’t know if, at that age, I even liked movies; it was all about smut. I did more watching of horror and action on VHS, when I was actually renting, because it was about getting together with friends. I remember trolling, learning that The Movie Channel was square except for Joe Bob Briggs. You wouldn’t get much on HBO, but of course Skinamax (Cinemax) delivered like clockwork on late night weekends. Shannon Tweed, all those thrillers about a phone killer. The game of was he or she a sociopathic killer, or just the sexiest person on the planet: ‘I know I should stay away because he’s a serial killer, but he fucks the shit out of me!’ ‘Red Shoe Diaries’, of course, Zalman King in general. It was either the serial killer movies, or on the ‘classier’ channels I’d keep my eyes open for the neo-noirs that always seemed to have Virginia Madsen in them. There definitely was a sexy neo-noir early-’90s craze. They would just keep remaking ‘Double Indemnity’, but with on-screen fucking. An image that floats through my mind is a Cadillac convertible with Virginia Madsen at the wheel, lace covering her face — even if that didn’t appear in any movie I actually saw.”

KTLA Channel 5: “When I moved back to L.A. to live with my mom after being with my dad for a year, I found myself with no cable TV, so I watched a lot of movies on KTLA. They would always do these festivals; that’s where the store’s ‘Animal Disaster’ section comes from. It would be like ‘Monday, ants! Tuesday, frogs! Wednesday, bees!’ These were literally the names of the movies: ‘Ants’, ‘Frogs’, ‘The Bees’. I remember a week where they did nothing but ant movies. That’s where I first saw ‘Phase IV’, one of my favorite science-fiction movies to this day. ‘Phase IV’, for me, is the archetypal film where you couldn’t remember what it was called, and would spend years trying to figure out what it was. I’ve seen many customers come into the store and do that with other films; ‘War of the Gargantuans’ is another big one that happens with: ‘There’s a brown one — and a green one!’ Any movie like that is worth watching, because it’s powerful enough to bury itself in the cerebral cortex permanently.”

other memories:
- Eddie And The Cruisers (”Never seen it, but saw the ad for it on cable a zillion times. I probably saw minutes of it here and there. ‘Doctor Detroit’ and ‘Eddie And The Cruisers’ were on so much. In my child mind, ‘Eddie And The Cruisers’ had to have been important, because of how often they showed it.”)
- The Bedroom Window (”Directed by Curtis Hanson. Guttenberg. Guttenberg seemed to be everywhere.”)
- Summer School
- North Shore
- Fright Night
- Lucas
- Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
- The Legend of Billie Jean

final thoughts:
“I watched almost nothing at the time from beginning to end. I would see the second half of ‘Legend of Billie Jean,’ and then later the first half. It took me several piecemeal viewings to see a lot of these movies. Somehow I did watch ‘Wisdom’, by Emilio Estevez all the way through and really liked it; I thought that shit was funny, and then I re-watched it years later and thought that shit was stupid.’ Was watching movies in pieces a function of being a kid, or of something more O.C.D.-related? ‘I thought it was merely a function of cable, because before TiVo you were always channel-flipping and coming in half-way. How often do you sit right down exactly at 8 o’clock to watch a movie? It’s a testimony to which movies could hold your attention as a kid under such conditions.

That, and later working at video stores trained me to watch things in pieces. At least as many movies as I’ve seen all the way though, I’ve seen twice as many in pieces. It’s everything from not completely paying attention and just seeing what it looks like, to getting all the way through a film while watching it in the store with all the usual retail interruptions. That includes movies I’ve only heard the audio from as I’m clerking. I do take movies off in the store if I really want to watch them, but I’m not going to be like Woody Allen in ‘Annie Hall’, who won’t watch anything he’d missed the beginning of. Think about that, that film was from ‘77, just a year or two before VCRs and cable started permeating the culture.“

Plot outline: A fast-paced docu-comedy alternating between film-within-a-film hazardous stunts done by Grant Page (the Aussie stuntman who was co-ordinator of dangerous things for “Mad Max”), and a concert film of Sorcery, a KISS-esque D&D-themed hard rock band. Occasionally the two threads intertwine.

We Cinefiles were lucky enough to attend a 35mm theatrical revival screening of this just a few days ago, and while some of us had seen the film before, we’d forgotten just how wicked awesome the thing is. The film’s director, journeyman Brian Trenchard only had 15 days to shoot the whole thing back in ‘78, and not only is it wildly entertaining, but it shows just what you can pull off with a shortened budget if you’ve got your filmmaking chops together (the film looks like it would’ve taken three times as long as it actually took to film, with probably three or four cameras shooting the entire time.)

Trenchard-Smith not only was present at the screening, but he had invited us to the thing in the first place via e-mail. Here’s what he wrote upon reflection about his own creation:

It’s an oddball piece. Quite lively but quite wacky and strange. As you know I’ve made a lot of trailers over the years. In its way, this is like a 90 minute trailer. I had this idea in the shower one morning. Australian Stuntman meets American Rock Band…much stunt and much rock takes place, the kids will tear up the seats. Perhaps I should have stayed unwashed that day. To my immense surprise, my 6 page treatment was financed by a Dutch company within a month and I was on a plane to LA immediately. It had to co-star Verhoeven favorite actress Monique Van Der Ven, and be ready for screening in Dutch theatres in 4 months. Who was I to say no? When my father-in-law saw the end result, he said that he had not experienced so much noise since he was under bombardment in the Pacific.”

By far, the most palatable song that Sorcery does in the movie is their tribute to Grant Page, fittingly enough called “Stuntrocker.” It shows a lot of melodic promise, and if only all their songs were as good as this one, they might’ve gone far —

Sorcery - Stuntrocker (MP3)

Remember that Shining redux trailer? The one with the Peter Gabriel song? This one’s from the same guy, Manhattan editor Robert Ryang. He’s got a quite a little resume going at this point. After the Shining trailer got so popular the New York Times covered it, the Independent Spirit Awards hired him to make a couple more. One, in which he would take an independent movie (Blue Velvet) and make it look like a mainstream movie (Monster-In-Law, I guess), which you can look at here. And the one above, in which he was to take a mainstream movie and make it look independent.

There’s a fair amount of more interesting info to be found on Ryang, and other trailer recuts by the gaggle of editors he works with. But, since I’m already at risk of simply parroting another blog, I’ll pass on the interested to The Tattered Coat’s well-researched entry.

Plot outline: The competition heats up as a young man on the cusp of adulthood in Brentwood, CA, prepares for his upcoming bar mitzvah, and his father strives to outdo the gargantuan coming-of-age bash recently thrown by his number-one nemesis, in a madcap tale of Hebrew rivalry.

We were prepared for the wurst when we noticed that Garry Marshall had a supporting role in the film, but were pleasantly surprised to find that he’s actually the most interesting and low-key thing in it. There’s also a handful of genuinely funny set pieces throughout, like the “Titanic”-themed bar mitzvah that takes place on a cruise liner. During that sequence, hip-hop MC DJ Quik (who recently did a five-month stint in jail for assaulting his sister) makes a surprise appearance during the traditional chair-raising Hora dance —

DJ Quik - “Hava Nagila, Beer Wine, Tequila” (MP3)

Here’s the start of a new series we’re calling “Cable Daze”, profiles of what films stick out the most in the minds of each Cinefile employee from the early days of their cable-TV watching, and why.

name: Sebastian O’ Brien, Cinefile day shift
primary watching years: 1981-1984

“Doctor Detroit”: “I found myself amused by Dan Ackroyd’s main character because he’s an alter ego super-villain, plus he’s a pimp! And one of his ‘girls’ is Fran Drescher, who I always had the hots for. It’s not a good movie, but it’s got a lot of entertainment value to it. Have you ever seen ‘Doctor Detroit’? God, I wanna watch ‘Doctor Detroit’ now! The more I think about it, the more I like it, still. It was a colossal bomb that nobody liked.”

“The Last American Virgin”: “The single most-watched movie by me on cable, sheerly because it had boobs. As a kid, you’d know exactly which parts of the movie had the boobs in it, and you’d sit through the whole thing just for those moments.” Did the legendary soundtrack to this film (Blondie, The Cars, Devo, Journey) rub off on you as a music fan? “At the time I was listening to heavy metal. Journey was in a ton of those movies, and if you’d asked my 13-year-old self, I would’ve said ‘Journey is for fags!’, but I like Journey’s music now because of that association. Those movies turned me onto the band’s charms.”

“Looking For Mr. Goodbar” (WARNING! Spoilers ahead…): “I was shocked and disturbed by this one when it was randomly on one night when I was watching with my dad, when I visited him at his house. It’s got a lot of sex, and then it ends in horrible violence. Diane Keaton plays this swinging ’70s slut girl, who goes around fucking ever guy she can find — until the last guy who she fucks stabs her to death while a strobe light is going. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. I didn’t even understand that you could make a movie like that! She was ‘Annie Hall’, you know? ‘Annie Hall’ getting stabbed to death while fucking a guy. It ends on her dead face, staring off into space as a strobe light is going! It might as well have been a snuff film.”

other memories:
- The Toy
- Halloween III: Season Of The Witch
- Trading Places
- The Golden Child
- House
- Troll
- Night Shift
- the “Vacation” movies
- the first few “Police Academy” movies (”I remember thinking Michael Winslow, the guy who made all the noises, was hilarious.”)
- Blame It On Rio (”The titillating 13-year-old horniness factor…”)
- Howard The Duck (”Saw it at least 5 or 6 times…”)
- The Hitchhiker, TV series (”Do you remember ‘The Hitchhiker’? It was the sexy horror anthology show that hinged around this mysterious guy that would wander from town to town, a la Bill Bixby in ‘The Incredible Hulk’? Somehow it always involved sex and monsters.”)

summation:
“Cable came into prominence during my adolescence, and it was a metaphor for the magic disappearing from my world. When I was a little kid, I loved going out to the movies. The ritual of it was a big deal, especially going out to see R-rated films (the first one I ever saw was ‘Alien’.) I would brag about it to my friends and they’d go “Oooh, you saw an R-rated movie?!” But since cable had R-rated stuff on all the time, it diminished that, because anyone could see one just by staying up late.

The whole transient nature of movies being on whenever, catching bits and pieces of them, diminished my awe of film. It’s like getting cake everyday for dessert; it’s not special anymore. Also, something I didn’t realize at the time was that everything on was pan-and-scan, and I literally wasn’t getting the same thing as in a theater. I really do love going to the movies; it’s like my church, with the movie presented to me the way they wanted it to be presented. Even with high-def DVD, I’ll still be going out to the movies.

Cable’s strange because even now, you don’t have a choice. You’re at the whim of these programmers. Who are they? Who were the people programming cable? How does it even work? I have no idea.”

Tom Sutpin, writing in the Bright Lights Film Journal, sez:

“Portrait of Jason”, for those like me who weren’t around back in ’67 for the halcyon days of the New American Cinema, is a black-and-white, 16mm, 105-minute film wherein a bespectacled, aging African-American hustler, looking dapper in a white shirt and blue blazer, rehearses his life, times, ambitions, and philosophies of livin’ before a single camera that does its best to keep up with him and often succeeds quite beautifully (Jason’s rap does occasionally exceed the amount of film in the camera, causing a blank screen from time to time). It’s been described as so many things through the years that one possible explanation for the persistent unavailability — except for a rare, out-of-print VHS tape from Mystic Fire Video — of a film so exceptional has been its unusual way of eluding all categorization. It isn’t a documentary, really; it isn’t even a “cinema verite” exercise (it’s been referred to as both repeatedly, in some instances by critics who are halfway perceptive). Many of the newspaper and magazine reviewers who covered it during its initial run wrote it off as yet another low-budget Underground freak show, the kind of movie Andy Warhol and Jack Smith and the Kuchar brothers might have conjured if they’d all somehow hooked up at the right time (a prospect as forbidding as it is intriguing). “Portrait of Jason” isn’t really an interview either, since the closest thing to a coherent question throughout is Carl Lee’s repeated prodding of Jason from just off-camera (”Hey, Jason . . . tell the Cop story”; “Talk about Brother Tough”). Waxing poetic, Clarke’s Film-makers’ Cooperative confrere Storm de Hirsch called it a “bold, incisive choreography, a dance of the human ego in all its ugly, beautiful nakedness”; Ingmar Bergman simply said it was the most fascinating movie he’d ever seen (Bergman, of course, was checking in from Sweden, where black homosexual male prostitutes with a compulsive showbiz bent have never exactly been . . . underfoot).

Going on stage, while it could have put some much-needed bread in his pocket, would’ve been awfully redundant.

The film was re-released on DVD in the U.K. in 2005. Here’s the audio track from the film in its entirety, which works remarkably well like a good episode of “This American Life” would.

Shirley Clarke - “Portrait Of Jason (audio track, MP3)

Plot outline (having just about nothing to do with the first two “Halloween” films: A Halloween mask-making company has plans to kill millions of American children with something sinister hidden in Halloween masks. Druids, laser beams and the flabby chest of Tom Atkins all collide in a thrill ride for the ages.

With “Assault On Precinct 13″ and “Halloween”, John Carpenter displayed considerable muscle both as a filmmaker and a musician. His title themes for both films are instantly recognizable, hummable — and also sound great when played on any cheap synthesizer. The scores for “The Fog” and “Halloween II” are less interesting but still good (heavy on the atmospherics), but it’s the one-two punch of the music from “Escape From New York” and “Halloween III”, both done in collaboration with Alan Howarth, that make me shiver with child-like excitement.

“Halloween III” also happens to be, believe it or not, my favorite horror film of the ’80s, even beating out the impeccable “Monster Squad” (the only PG-13 film I know in which a vampire antagonist calls a 4-year-old a “bitch” right to her face). Dean Cundey’s cinematography is just great, the script (first drafted by “Quatermass” creator Nigel Kneale) is genuinely funny, and Dan O’Herlihy’s easily as good here as the villian as he is in “The Last Starfighter”, playing that half-man/half-turtle dude. It is weird, though, how Carpenter chose to score this film and not direct it, when compared with “The Thing” in the same year (1982), which he directed but did not score (Morricone did that one.)

John Carpenter & Alan Howarth - “Halloween III: Season Of The Witch” soundtrack (ZIP file)