I’m at the final hurdle, the last stretch of my journey looking at third films in horror movie franchises. To be honest, I’ve had to do some serious bottom-of-the-barrel scraping for this final section.

Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead (1994)

BOOOOOOOY! The Tall Man is a massively overlooked horror icon, always seeming to get forgotten whenever people talk about the greats of the genre. In fact, I’d even say that the Phantasm films in general are usually given short shrift. Leaning more into a weird sci-fi horror angle, they don’t quite feel like typical slashers. And let’s not forget Reggie, perhaps the most unlikely horror hero ever committed to film, but he is awesome. These Phantasm flicks are gloriously bizarre and certainly aren’t in the same critical league as some of the heavyweights I’ve already covered, but I genuinely like them.

Phantasm III definitely falls into that “not as good as the first” category, but it successfully avoids being outright terrible, and it’s certainly not a film that should have killed the franchise. It’s absolute nonsense, but frankly, all of the films are nonsense, so it fits right in.

With two more sequels after this one, none of the films are up there with the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th in terms of massive cinematic footprint. But here’s the thing: I don’t think I would call any of the Phantasm flicks truly amazing (the original is easily the best), nor would I call any of them particularly bad. All of them seem to hover around the same steady level of “worth a watch, kind of fun, pretty decent.” Because none of the films really excel or fail spectacularly, the franchise feels remarkably even. There’s no major drop in quality like you see in other series, no gargantuan highpoints followed by massive nosedives. All five films are worth watching if you want a balanced, completely bizarre sci-fi horror ride. This might genuinely be the most consistent horror film franchise out there, even if it is just a consistently okay one.

The Howling III: The Marsupials (1987)

When it comes to classic werewolf flicks from 1981, An American Werewolf in London is the absolute peak. But Joe Dante’s original The Howling from that same year is also well worth a watch. Fast forward a mere six years, however, and we got The Howling III: The Marsupials. It’s a film about a runaway werewolf girl who literally has a marsupial-like pouch for her young baby. There’s also something about soldiers hunting werewolves. Oh, and Dame Edna Everage is in it… because, naturally, it’s set in Australia.

There are some horror films that know they have no way of matching, let alone topping, the original film in the franchise, so they lean into comedy and self-parody as a protective shield. Few films pull this off well. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 did it. The Child’s Play films after number three did it. Even Gremlins 2 had a blast mocking studio sequels. The Howling III tries to do the exact same thing, and it massively misses the mark. It tries to get a bit meta with a film-within-a-film concept. Werewolves dress as nuns (seriously). Assorted stupid, profoundly unfunny shit happens. This is bad, this is really bad. I’ve looked at some truly terrible third films so far, but this could genuinely be the worst of the bunch. The Howling III is so fucking awful that I’d honestly rather sit through Creepshow 3 again… and I never want to lay eyes on that film ever again.

Miraculously, there are five more Howling films after this one… five! I seriously want to know how people get paid to write utter shit like this, and see it get made into a film. How? I want a job like that, I can write really bad stories, characters, and dialogue. How on earth did this franchise survive releasing what is arguably the worst third film in horror history? Even worse, a reboot is currently in the works, meaning we haven’t seen the last of them yet.

Leprechaun 3 (1995)

Have you ever watched any of the Leprechaun films? See, this isn’t a franchise that started good and slowly got worse. Right from the first entry, this series is absolute trash. But in a way, that’s a brilliant strategic move because it starts right at the back of the pack, meaning it’s almost impossible to drop any lower. And here’s the secret: as long as you go into these flicks knowing they’re awful, they’re actually great fun. Aside from the film itself setting a remarkably low bar, the original is chiefly famous for being the feature film debut that gave Jennifer Aniston her first screen credit.

As for the third film, is it actually good? No, none of them are good. Warwick Davis plays the titular leprechaun, and he is brilliant in that delightfully “so bad it’s good” way. They really should have called this one Leprechaun in Las Vegas… because, well, it’s set in Las Vegas. This is a franchise that eventually spawned masterpieces of cinema like Leprechaun 4: In Space, Leprechaun in the Hood, and Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood. Oh yeah, this is a film series that unashamedly sinks that low. Yes, this flick is truly dreadful, but that’s precisely where its charm lies. Should the franchise have continued after part three? Absolutely, keep them coming. Just don’t ever try to make them “serious.” Wear the awfulness like a badge of honour.

Critters 3 (1991)

From Jennifer Aniston’s cinematic beginnings in the first Leprechaun film, we jump straight to Leonardo DiCaprio’s film debut in Critters 3. The first film is quite good, not an all-time classic, but still an entertaining creature feature. It’s often written off as a cheap Gremlins rip-off, primarily because both features involve malevolent little monsters running amok. However, according to director Stephen Herek, the script for the first Critters was actually finished before Gremlins even went into production. In fact, the reason Critters came out a couple of years after Gremlins was because they had to go back and rewrite scenes to remove the glaring similarities… or so the story goes.

While the original film is watchable, this third entry certainly isn’t. Then again, Critters 2: The Main Course was pretty awful too, so part three wasn’t even that jarring of a nosedive. The Critters franchise isn’t a particularly massive one, just five films in total and a short-lived TV show. Honestly, looking back, they probably should have pulled the plug after the very first film.

Slumber Party Massacre III (1990)

Ah, Roger Corman. The only person who somehow managed to shoot a half-decent Fantastic Four movie… only for it to never see the light of day. Corman is one of the undisputed kings of schlock filmmaking, and he went on to produce the entire Massacre series of films. Let’s be entirely honest here: the only reason these movies exist is to showcase attractive women getting murdered in increasingly bloody ways, occasionally with their tits out. They are objectively not good films, and what started out as a tongue-in-cheek parody of slasher tropes eventually devolved into a lazy parody of itself.

Slumber Party Massacre III is the quintessential low-rent rubbish that inevitably garners a dedicated cult following. It’s not a good film, it’s utterly atrocious, though, thankfully, still nowhere near as soul-crushing as The Howling III: The Marsupials. It’s also a surprisingly bizarre franchise when you look at the structure. See, there were originally only three Slumber Party Massacre films, making it a tidy, self-contained trilogy. But then things got out of hand, spawning entire parallel universes of “Massacre” spin-offs. You don’t just have the Slumber Party Massacre trilogy; you also have a Sorority House Massacre trilogy (complete with a fourth film shot back in 2002 intended for a 2007 release, only for the production company to go bust, leaving it stranded in limbo). Then there’s the Cheerleader Massacre duo, a standalone shark-thriller called Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre, and, of course, the inevitable modern remake.

So, is the third film worth a watch, and should the franchise have continued? Yes and yes. These flicks are pure toilet water, they’re genuinely terrible. But they comfortably fall into that Leprechaun category where, if you go in with your eyes wide open knowing they’re shit, you’re guaranteed to have a good time.

Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes (2006)

I’ll admit, I had never actually seen a Pumpkinhead film before I started researching for this article. I’d heard of them, of course, but never watched one, though I did play the abysmal Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead’s Revenge PC game back in the ’90s. So, to properly get myself up to speed, I watched the entire franchise. Well… since there are only four films in total, it wasn’t strictly a monumental Herculean task. Actually, I take that back, because simply dragging myself through the first film was a monumental feat of endurance. These films are truly, shockingly bad.

Now, some bad movies have a certain inherent charm. They lean into their own awfulness, play up the B-movie tropes, and become an absolute blast to watch even though they are objectively terrible. The Pumpkinhead franchise, however, tries desperately to be a serious horror contender, it wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street, and it fails miserably. I honestly don’t even know how I managed to push past the first film, let alone suffer through the third, and then willingly subject myself to the fourth. Still… I sat through The Howling III, so I suppose nothing could possibly be that bad. Nothing.

Do you really need me to ask and answer whether this franchise should have carried on past the third installment? Thankfully, the creators finally had the common sense to quit after part four. It’s just a damn shame they didn’t get that memo before they ever started production on the first one.

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1993)

I only learned that there was even a sequel to the first film through researching this article. I watched the original Maniac Cop in the late 1980s. It was nothing special, a very average slasher. It was such an unremarkable film, neither particularly good nor outright terrible, that I never even considered that there might be a sequel, let alone two of them. So yeah, of course I watched them for this piece. And yes, I deeply regret it.

Now, to be fair, Maniac Cop 2 is actually a pretty decent watch and definitely an upgrade from the first. As for Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence? Nope, utter arse gravy. As I was watching it, it felt less like a movie and more like a collection of unfinished scenes stitched together that made zero narrative sense. I had to look into the production history, and it turns out there’s a fascinatingly disastrous story behind it.

Originally, screenwriter Larry Cohen penned a script featuring a black detective as the lead who is investigating a series of brutal murders in Harlem. Director William Lustig started scouting locations and even began casting, but there was a massive snag with the Japanese distributor funding the film. When said distributor heard that the project was starring a black lead, they refused to put up the cash. They demanded Robert Davi back, who had played the hero in Maniac Cop 2. Lustig argued that forcing Davi into the story wouldn’t work with the script they had, but he was overruled and Davi was hired anyway.

This meant the existing script, written specifically around a black detective in Harlem, now made absolutely no sense with a white lead. Cohen offered to rewrite the screenplay, but demanded to be paid for the extra labour; the producers flat-out refused. So they went ahead and shot the film as-is, but were forced to cut every scene that no longer made sense. This left the film running at a paltry 50 minutes long.

Lustig promptly walked off the production, leaving another director to shoot nonsensical filler scenes to pad out the runtime. They even resorted to using outtakes from Maniac Cop 2 to plug the narrative gaps. The end result was an incoherent disaster that made no logical sense whatsoever.

Yeah, it’s dreadful. Thankfully, they only ever made three films, meaning there was nothing more to endure and the franchise blessedly ended right here.

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! (1989)

Yeah, you better watch out because… it’s garbage day! No, wait, that was Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. Bill Moseley is in this third entry, sporting a glass dome over his exposed brain. If that sentence makes no sense to you, don’t worry: it fits this film’s nonsensical plot perfectly. I feel like I’ve skipped over the single best thing about this franchise, the 1984 original. Not for the film itself, mind you, but for the moral outrage it birthed. This third entry is pretty bad, so let’s talk about that glorious controversy instead.

The original film kicked up an enormous fuss because conservative Christian groups claimed a movie about a killer dressed as Santa Claus was a direct assault on Christmas and religion. It escalated to the point where Kathleen Eberhardt, a housewife from Milwaukee, founded a pressure group called Citizens Against Movie Madness. They staged protests outside cinemas showing the film, successfully lobbied to pull TV adverts, and forced several theatre chains to cancel planned screenings. One protester declared:

“The film portends something extremely violent, something terroristic about Christmas. It’s an intrusion against something we hold sacred.”

A horror film causing a moral panic was hardly a new phenomenon, even back in 1984. But the fallout here never made a lick of sense to me. Why were religious campaigners kicking up such a fuss about a holiday that was originally a Pagan winter festival hijacked by Christianity in the first place? It isn’t even strictly their celebration to get upset about! But even setting history aside… Santa Claus isn’t real. Furthermore, the killer in the movie is never portrayed as the actual Santa, he’s explicitly a bloke in a costume. And lastly, Santa is a secular pop-culture figure, not a religious deity. So why were religious fundamentalists flying off the handle about a slasher flick that had nothing to do with religion?

Anyway, back to the third film: it’s really not very good. But this is a franchise where none of the entries are particularly great, so there’s no dramatic fall from grace to mourn. Even across five original films and two…yes, two remakes, it remains thoroughly generic and sub-standard throughout.

From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter (1999)

The original From Dusk Till Dawn is a fantastic movie. But I’m not covering that film, no, I’m covering this awful direct-to-video sequel that doubles as a prequel. To be fair, a prequel wasn’t a terrible concept on paper, given that the original movie ends leaving plenty of unanswered questions about the historical origins of the vampire brothel. However, this is not the prequel that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s original deserved. The acting is wooden, the script feels like it was generated by a primitive AI decades before AI writing existed, and the visual effects work is utterly shoddy.

There were tentative plans to produce a fourth feature film in the franchise. Fortunately, those never materialised, leaving the film series as a trilogy with only one good movie to its name. There was a TV series adaptation later on, which was passable. The only genuinely nice thing I can say about From Dusk Till Dawn 3 is that, despite being a truly atrocious film, it is still somehow just slightly better than From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money.

Alien 3 (1992)

Time for me to piss off a huge chunk of the horror community. I like Alien 3. Not only do I like it, but I genuinely think it’s far superior to Aliens. It still doesn’t touch the perfection of Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, but it’s a damn good film.

Alien 3 has been lambasted for decades, from the day it hit cinemas right up to the present. “Waaaaahhhh, they killed Newt and Hicks in the opening! Waaaaahhhh!” So fucking what? Newt was unbelievably annoying, and Hicks was a one-dimensional action sterotype. James Cameron himself publicly slammed the decision to kill off those characters, calling it a “slap in the face” to him and fans of his sequel. Then Cameron went ahead and killed off John Connor in the opening minutes of Terminator: Dark Fate. Quick, let’s move on before anyone spots the glaring hypocrisy!

I like Alien 3 because it feels raw, unapologetic, and boasts some genuinely terrifying sequences. It stripped away the grand action spectacle and returned the franchise to its survival-horror roots: no absurdly equipped space marines with pulse rifles taking on a horde, just one terrifying alien, an unprepared group of defenseless humans, claustrophobic quarters, and nowhere to run. That is what a core Alien film should be.

Yes, I know all the infamous behind-the-scenes horror stories. The endless script rewrites. The fact that the studio had already burned through $7 million before they even had a finalised screenplay. The atrocious way 20th Century Fox treated a young David Fincher, to the point where Fincher has completely disowned the movie and insists nobody hates it more than he does. Yet despite all that production hell, there is still a brilliant film in there. I can only imagine how incredible it would have been if the studio suit brigade had simply left Fincher alone to make the film he wanted to make. The Assembly Cut is fantastic, not a true director’s cut (since Fincher refused to be involved with it), but a vast improvement over the theatrical release.

Alien 3 is bloody great. When some fans finally stop being James Cameron dick-sucking crybabies and look at the film for what it actually is, rather than what they think it should have been, they might just see it for the dark masterpiece it really is.

As for whether the franchise should have continued after this? The Alien brand is gargantuan: seven mainline films (including prequels), two crossover spin-offs, two TV series, and twenty-one short films, not to mention a mountain of novels, comics, and video games. Should it have continued after part three? In a couple of rare instances, yes. In a great many others, absolutely not.

Beyond Re-Animator (2003)

This is the last one, I promise. Now, the issue with this third film is that it falls squarely into that “nowhere near as good as the original” category, while remaining undeniably good fun on its own B-movie terms. The further misadventures of Dr Herbert West and his glowing re-animation serum are just silly, bloody, campy fun. None of these films are what I would consider top-tier horror masterpieces, but all three are definitely worth a watch.

Now, given that there are only three films in this specific line, my core question of whether the franchise should have carried on past part three is a bit moot. However, there were ambitious plans to produce an entire second trilogy. House of Re-Animator was set to tell the story of a sitting US President who dies in office and is brought back to life using Herbert West’s questionable medical expertise. Island of Re-Animator was going to be a mad-scientist spin on The Island of Doctor Moreau, featuring Dr West running a secret island laboratory. Finally, Re-Animator Begins would have seen an amnesiac West cross paths with the granddaughter of Dr Hans Gruber from the first film… who was still technically “alive” in a re-animated state.

Honestly, that is precisely the kind of unhinged, high-concept nonsense trilogy that would have worked brilliantly. Alas, funding could never be secured, and those scripts were shelved. Technically, an independent film called Herbert West: Re-Animator came out in 2017, but given that H. P. Lovecraft’s original short story is in the public domain, anyone is legally free to adapt it. It isn’t part of the official Stuart Gordon/Jeffrey Combs continuity, but I gues it is still part of the iverall frnachise.

And that’s your lot! My personal critical take on those pesky threequels and whether these franchises deserved to live on or be put out of their misery. Whatever you’re getting up to this spooky season, watch some good films. As for me, I’m off to indulge in my personal Halloween tradition of sitting down with the glorious Halloween III: Season of the Witch.