Movie Mindset 14 - Halloween Sex God: A Tom Atkins Double Feature
Will & Hesse look at two starring God Tom Atkins: John Carpenter’s “The Fog” (1980) & Tommy Lee Wallace’s “Halloween III: Season of the Witch”. Also a Carpenter double feature of sorts, one from the director himself, and one continuing from his iconic Halloween (1978) film as he intended the franchise to be, an anthology. The Fog is a true American ghost story wrestling with monstrous crimes of our past, and Halloween III is an outrageous gorefest with one of the most infamously ludicrous plots in all horror cinema. Tom Atkins plays an everyman sex symbol in both, laying pipe as he’s terrorized by ghosts & robots through anonymous northern California towns.
Note: Will promised we’d timestamp the Tom Atkins Ass Shot in the description. I do not have time to do that this evening. Sorry.
Comments (89)
Saw The Fog for the first time last night, terrible movie but I enjoyed it
Goddamn, it just sunk in how awesome the lives of Chapo people are. When you can say, completely casually "I remember Alan Moore telling me once..." And refer to a one on one convo he had with him about witchcraft. That is so fucking cool
He'll talk to anybody
I'm sorry, but straight up the worst take anyone on Chapo has had is Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the hottest women ever. I mean I'm not doing "2/10 would not bang" obviously she's way outta my league, but if I were for some wack reason compiling a list of the hottest women in Hollywood, she wouldn't be in the top 100
Lol I'm sorry Henry James is American born, but yes turn of the screw is set in England. Still he's American in disposition
43:01
My second daughter was born yesterday morning, and we watched Halloween 3 that evening in the hospital. When walking to get us coffee this morning I couldn’t stop thinking ‘with this nursing staff here, if the Doctor’s were as frisky as Challis they would get the absolute shit beat out of them’
The scariest scene is when the daughter comes out of the shower and wraps up in that disgusting motel bedspread. Just before Tom ‘Hungry Baby’ Atkins skips right over the kissing and latches on to that tittie like there’s no tomorrow.
These are 2 great anti-irish movies featuring Tom Atkins as an alcoholic who fucks young women
They’ll have some work to do to catch up to Israel for blowing up children’s heads.
When Will said that blue collar Tom Atkins looked really out of place as a doctor, I pictured Dennis Farina as a doctor and got a good laugh.
The thing Will said about Pasadena reminded me of an interview I heard with Tom Hanks. A British radio show host said something along the lines of him being the embodiment of someone from the American midwest and Hanks replied that he was from California.
Leprechauns & leper coins 🪙
Volume level so low on this recording?
Halloween III: Season of the Micks
the first time I went to LA I stayed with a friend and we went to the Pasadena four of July parade--my buddy said, "Oh yeh--there's the house from Halloween." LA rules. If you didn't need a car, I'd have moved there. Fuck the Giants also.
Does Atkins shave his gooch?
The Wohopper song feels like some sort of Manchurian Canidate trigger word. Each new BK ad gives me a new objective.
Couple points of order from a North Bay native: The Fog was shot in Point Reyes, a place which at the time was experiencing a conversion from sleepy coastal town that happened to be one of the most gorgeously beautiful places in the world into insufferable rich bitch paradise. Santa Mira is the fictional Sonoma County town where the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers takes place, and has been used as the name for "Anonymous Northern California Coastal Town" ever since. It's based on Bodega, which is where Hitchcock shot The Birds, and Halloween 3 was shot in West Sonoma/Marin, which is also where Synanon constructed their gulag, which was recently converted to a luxury hotel. This area is interesting cinematically, and referring your thesis of 'it's all haunted,' it should be noted the expediency and brutality of California colonialism while being one of the most habitable places every found by any group of people. It also visually evokes a very spooky coastal English countryside look while still appearing unique.
I watched halloween 3 as a child and buy did it make me afraid of scary movies and haunted houses for like 5 years
Don't sit so close to the TV. You'll hurt your eyes. Don't cross your eyes they'll get stuck like that. This movie was extra terrifying for me as a kid. I remember why I've avoided this movie for years. Mortified me as a kid and still a bit today. Excellent episode. I definitely need to revisit Season of The Witch. The anthology path would've been cool if they stuck to it. For anyone that hasn't done so, please watch Night of The Creeps for more Tom Atkins bad assery. THRILL ME!
Why did the Mormons wear such loud shoes in the hospital?
Nice name drop on Will's part "this reminds me of when my best friend, acclaimed author Alan Moore, said..."
Take that stuff down the street to the Dick Cavett - TAFS set, boys!
Being a guy from Northern CA, these movies are total comfort movies for me. I've made multiple trips to both the lighthouse from The Fog in Point Reyes and the factory in Loleta. I recently moved to Oregon, and was feeling a little homesick. I went to throw on The Fog and couldn't find my blu-ray. Total catastrophe!
Never had any interest in watching Halloween 3 but after about 10 minutes of your commentary about the film, I stopped the podcast and streamed the movie.
Narcotic relief recommendations for the Silver Shamrock tune?
The drunk priest was such a hero. Immediately disgusted with the actions of his grandfather, says the celebration shouldn’t take place, and feels such deep guilt that he willingly offers his life to the ghouls. Was ready to be dragged to hell to make everyone square!!!
that's probably my no. 1 beef with the film; he really does offer himself up to the ghouls, and yet when they finally get him it's played like a gotcha. maybe there's something about his Catholic desire for sacrifice/self-abnegation but there isn't much in the text of the film to support that. oh well.
Darwin Joston has a really amusing bit in ERASERHEAD, too. The way I heard about it, either he didn't enjoy the acting grind or the phone simply wasn't ringing, and he went back to transpo jobs after a spate of smaller and smaller roles in the 1980s.
More like ghoulie GRINDSET the way you’re churning out bangers.
it would be fine to entertain Precinct 13 as JC's best in a universe where he never made The Thing
"The cause of all our problems...the Irish."
Atkins has starred in a series of plays about Pittsburgh Steelers owners. Amazing.
An all time Yinzer
Isn't it his ex wife in Halloween III?
Speaking of Hadrian’s Wall, RIP the ROBIN HOOD tree
"Between midnight and 1, it will find you" not my ass listening to this line at 12:59 AM eastern standard time
I’m spooked!
who up and tryna steal a pillar from stonehenge
U know I fired this up on my spooky sunset walk
Not to be that guy but Goleta is pronounced Go-Lee-ta
This movie truly disturbed me in my childhood...lol...I was just expecting a simple slasher that Marge/ Death/Laser scene was fucking wild...lol
Halloween III is the most overrated underrated movie of all time.
I think a perfect companion movie to The Fog IMO would be Event Horizon. they both play on that same type of horror of: it's not the fear of getting lost in the void of space or dying at sea, it's the fear of what you thought was lost or forgotten *coming back* either out for revenge or because hell literally spat it back out.
My favorite Tom Atkins is from Maniac Cop - (at a bar, to a reporter) "I want you to make it bigger than AIDS!"
Male witches have to work twice as hard and be twice as evil as their female witch counterparts.
Carpenter’s normally very spare cinematic style is, for me, one of the many things that makes Big Trouble in Little China, because it’s SUCH a contrast. That film is chock full of detail and visual elaboration, gloriously so.
I can't believe neither Will nor Hesse mentioned that Stacey Nelkin was Woody Allen's teenage girlfriend (she was 17 and he was 42) who supposedly inspired Mariel Hemingway's character in Manhattan.
They probably don’t want to get sued.
I’m sorry but the radio station in the fog plays nothing but bangers
It's basically funky '70s lofi https://youtu.be/L36d7p5TgEI?si=79t-ziwksjkPMaGk
Will never seems to tire of the “bitch wife” joke
So spooky, thank you!
Nigel Kneal, the guy who wrote Quatermass and the Pit, did write Halloween 3 HOWEVER he asked Carpenter that his name be taken off since he hated the violence of the movie
"Where are you going to sleep Dr. Challis?" *open mouth kisses girl, cuts to next day* Tom Atkins on bluray commentary: "Damn what the hell kind of doctor am I?!"
Anthology would have been so much better for Halloween. What do we have now? Oh no you don't tell me this 73 year old mental patient escaped containment for the fourth time!
Curious what we thought of Halloween Ends here due to its similarities to Halloween III here, I thought it was brilliant in the context of the existence of the rest of the series, almost like an attempt to meet the anthology idea halfway.
I didn't like Ends at first, but on a rewatch liked it much more. The opening scene may be the best opening scene in the series since the original. Halloween Kills, on the other hand, was a total slog.
Holy shit Halloween 3 was so good, I was not ready to have for the mind expansion it caused. Dammit I wish I could make the screening.
at around 21:00 when will can't decide between style and fashion and almost said "stashion"... i felt that.
Hesse singing the Silver Shamrock theme is gonna be seared into my brain forevermore
The *most* Tom Atkins movie is likely still Night of the Creeps
How could you forget "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"????
*and he basically is that fun "friends cool dad" guy in reality
I met Tom in 2019 and he was awesome
Planning to listen later today, can anyone tell me if there are any Vincent Price imitations in this episode?
Seize them!
Amazing episode, and the single classic Hesse gunshot edit really topped it off lol
For a horrible moment I got Tom Atkins mixed up with Christopher Atkins and thought "good for Jamie Lee Curtis, what's so weird about that hook-up?- ah."
Halloween 2 is the best one fuck.
No
Is it just me, or is the audio really quiet on this one? Also I never got the hype for Halloween III. It was pretty good, but not amazing. Maybe you guys will convince me.
No, I had the same issues regarding audio
I grew up in the town where they filmed the first Halloween. It’s so weird seeing the high school and all the streets.
Awesome to hear that you went there, Will
I love listening to Tom Savini talk about how much he loved making Fluffy (the monster from The Crate segment in Creepshow). He just seems like such a nice man 🥰 https://youtu.be/Pe_pN-j8sEo?si=w6UiQQo_3MYIR8HY
🎃 🍿 🎥 👻
"In the end, we don't decide these things you know, the planets do."
Halloween III is amazing. So glad it is getting the attention it deserves. Soundtrack slaps too - Carpenter’s best from that incredible 80s run with Alan Howarth
He's also great in Maniac Cop. Basically the John Cazale of 80s horror.
Hey everyone, I found the ass shot and it’s at exactly 43:00.
Lo-fi salty sea dog-type beat
Atkins wasn't in Monster Squad. He was in the amazing Night of the Creeps however.
Weds just got a little less bleak 🥲
I watched the Fog and absolutely randomly a few years back and thought it was very good and very funny
Halloween 3 has one of the coolest introductory credits
So glad y’all are doing Halloween III
🎃🎃