Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Fued (2007)
Dir. Michael Hurst
Wr. Michael Hurst
Starring Pumpkinhead, Lance Henriksen, etc.

So here we are at the last installment of the PUMPKINHEAD franchise to date, and my, what a ride it’s been. From the surprising respectability of the original to the predictable shittiness of PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS to the surprising shittiness and respectability of PUMPKINHEAD 3: ASHES TO ASHES, it’s been an emotional roller coaster for that pruney demonic extractor of vengeance via the medium of whacking people with big monster hands that we’ve come to know as Pumpkinhead. He’s lost Lance Henriksen and regained him; gone from Stan-Winston-designed puppet to sub-Sega Saturn quality CGI to his current man-in-suit getup; gone from theatrical film to DTV to Sci-fi-channel special; had an identical son who starred in part 2; gone through no less than three old ladies who play the mountain witch, and in the process burned through untold dozens of generic white TV actors.* So many memories. So many vengeances.

    In my last PUMPKINHEAD review, I noted its reliance on CGI which I said at the time “would look embarrassing on an episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.” Well, someone in the production must have thought the same thing, because to direct a sequel they actually got the one guy who might have a more relevant opinion on that matter than I do: Michael Hurst, who played Kevin Sorbo’s sidekick Iolaus** on that show. Iolaus smartly eschews Part 3’s CGI overreaching, relying instead on the same redesigned man-in-suit Pumpkinhead that I kind of liked last time around (turns out the change was necessary because the original Pumpkinhead had rotted away in storage, so pour one on the curb for the OG Pumpkinman.) He also brings a mildly clever new dynamic to insert our man Pumpkin into, that of the titular blood feud. After the unexpectedly watchable Part 3, I had high hopes that this one (which wikipedia claims, “is considered to be the best of the three sequels and it was more well received”***) would finally deliver on the promise thats been fleetingly on display in the others. I was ready to bask in that old Pumpkinhead charm.

Pumpkinhead, upon finding out he'd been cast in this movie.

    Unfortunately for Pumpkinheadophiles, (after 3 reviews, I’ve yet to come up with a suitable nickname for the big lunk. Pumpky? P-Head? Gourd-o?) what Iolaus doesn’t bring to the table is any amount of subtlety or artistry. He does have kind of a good central idea, however, which, in true Pumpkinhead fashion has one nicely ironic twist. The setup is this: somewhere in the black mountains hills of some undefined east-coast mountain range lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon (here given the unlikely name of Ricky McCoy). One day he and his woman were run off by another guy, who hit young Ricky in the eye (Ricky didn’t like that, nor did he like the fact that they go on to attempt to rape his younger sister) so he says, “I’m gonna git that boy.” So one day he walked out of town to book himself a room at the local witch’s room. Subsequently, Ricky did come equipped with a gun (in this case, a Pumpkinhead) to tear off the legs, etc, of his rivals. His rival it seemed, had broken his dreams, by stealing the girl of his fancy (as discussed previously). She had no nicknames, and everyone knew her as Jodie Hatfield. No mention of Gideon’s bible, though. Maybe in the deleted scenes.

So yeah, feuding families named McCoy and Hatfield. That’s the level of artistry we’re talking about here. I’m surprised they’re not named Romeo and Juliet. And I’ll be honest, I stretched the lyrics of that song a little to fit the plot. Actually Ricky’s rivals are not romantic rivals, but members of a rival family of which Jodie is also a part. The two families have bin’ blood feudin’ and a’ fightin’ since their grandparents had a falling out over the ownership of an automobile. But this whole thing quickly escalates from innocent drunken brawls into demonic vengeance when a couple of Hatfield brothers, irate that a McCoy is schtupping their sister, beat him up and accidentally murder his little sister in an otherwise harmless attempt to brutally rape her. So, against the advice of ghostly Lance Henriksen, Ricky summons Pumpkinhead to kill off the entire Hatfield family (except his girlfriend. Why he thinks she’s gonna be OK with this turn of events is a matter left unexplored). And the local sheriff (porn-tastically name “Dallas Pope”) --himself a survivor of an earlier unrelated Pumpkinhead incident-- knows that the only way to stop the slaughter is to kill Ricky.

The one advantage this film has over its predecessors is that the slaughter itself is somewhat more enjoyable. Iolaus knows that he’s not gonna be able to recapture the atmospheric timelessness of the original, nor the creepy spartan sleaze of part 3, but he does have one trick up his sleeve which has up til now been curiously absent from the Pumpkinhead bag of tricks: gore. Yes, in part 2 he rips that annoying kid’s spine out, and he graphically impales not one but two people in part 3. But gore has never really been a staple of the series. Iolaus hasn’t got the chops or the interest in cultivating any kind of real psychological horror, but he at least commits to giving us some suitably fun bloody deaths. The special effects are not the best, but if you’re looking for gimmicky kills this is probably the best the series has to offer. Particularly memorable is a group of the Hatfields who runs afoul of a series of bear traps. It’s not exactly subtle, but there’s a certain skill required in setting people up as assholes and then dispatching them in satisfying ways. As artless as the movie generally is, it may be the best at executing this simple dynamic.

Pumpkinhead does not respect your personal space.

It’s less capable of executing its one interesting twist, though. The twist is that halfway through the film (once all the most hateable Hatfields have been killed off) the two families actually reconcile, and suddenly killing them all seems a bit unnecessary. So the McCoys and Ricky’s gal are left in the unenviable position of having deciding whether or not they’re going to help kill off their boy to save the family they have so much negative history with. Cool idea, but the execution is just too sloppy to really take it anywhere interesting. Mostly it just results in a bunch of not-so-great actors sitting around a table stating the obvious over and over. But finally Pumpkinhead comes back and indiscriminately kills everyone, so it’s all good. It’s sort of an interesting extension of the general Pumpkinhead theme of vengeance, though, so I’ll give it credit for the idea, even if it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting.

    Anyway, there’s not a lot of real tension or horror here. I still like the man-in-suit Pumpkinhead design pretty well, and he’s way more effective at killing yokels here than he’s been in the past, so he almost works as a credible physical threat even if he’s still this big slow lumbering lunk (actually, at the beginning we get to see a CGI version of him swinging through the trees like a monkey while chasing that old nemesis of hill people, punk kids on dirt bikes. So add that to the Pumpkinhead mythos.) Not really the stuff of nightmares, but as a indestructible dinosaur who roars a lot and sometimes bites people, it gets the job done. This would be a reasonably acceptable hook for a Sci-Fi Channel original movie called PUMPKINHEAD 4: BLOOD FEUD that you might halfway watch some painfully hungover Saturday afternoon**** when you were too lazy to change the channel. But for us lovers of the fine arts, you’re gonna have to throw us a little Lance Henriksen to make it worth our time to write up full reviews of your shit. Fortunately Iolaus is smart enough to realize this, and gives old Ed Harley a little more screen time and a slightly different perspective than last time.

Portrait of a man thinking seriously about firing his agent.

In part 3, Harley was a helpful but somewhat antagonistic figure, dressed all in black and possessing a kind of wicked black humor in keeping with that film’s tone. Here, he’s back in his white shirt and jeans from the original Pumpkinhead, and sporting a more sympathetic demeanor. He has literally nothing to do but provide unneeded exposition, but of course sells it with such class you quickly forget about everyone else and just listen to him. There’s a line where he mentions his dead son from part 1, and I swear to you he’s so good that I honestly felt a stirring of real human emotion. In the middle of this movie. It’s not quite as fun as his devilish turn in part 3, but he also gets a little more screen time here and it goes without saying that the only time the movie has even a hint of actual drama, it’s due to his hard work. He really seems to care about what happens to these inbred hicks, and even though you, a real human being watching this movie, could never share his interest --let alone concern-- you can at least sort of care in the sense that you want think to turn out ok for him.

I can’t lie, though, without Henricksen this would be pretty much unwatchable crap even by my standards. There’s a completely unacceptable ratio of yokels jawin’ about gingham and suchlike to scenes of Pumpkinhead killing them. It’s a nice concession to throw us some gore, but it’s not nearly imaginative or frequent enough to make it worth your time. I like a couple of the things Iolaus is trying to do, but he’s nowhere close to pulling it off. There’s absolutely nothing convincingly tragic, atmospheric, or scary about this iteration of the Pumpkinhead legend, and old Gourd-o just isn’t interesting enough on his own to sustain a creature feature that normal humans could watch and enjoy. And let me reiterate: this is the Sci-Fi Channel. He’s up against the likes of SHARKTOPUS and DINOCROC and CROCODILE 2: DEATH ROLL (which at least has the decency to star Martin Kove). Not exactly THE GODFATHER, but at least an honest, decent retardedly gimmicky concept. Pumpkinhead can’t compete against that. If this series is going any further (and obviously, it should), it’s gonna have to look inside itself and ask which is more horrifying: corrosive, toxic hatred in timeless hill country, or a big rubbery dinosaur that slaps people? Even with all its silly baggage, Pumpkinhead is conceptually interesting enough that it could legitmately have something to say about our cultural history of violent revenge against those who have “wronged” us -- all in the name of justice. Plus, there are still stars of HELLRAISER who haven’t yet tangled with the Pumpkinman. Those are two excellent reasons to try harder next time. Like Pumpkinhead himself (herself?) this series never seems to stay dead for long.

PUMPKINHEAD CHECKLIST:

Lance Henricksen:                                                                    YES

Bland And/or Irritating White Kids:                                            YES

Satisfying Kills:                                                                          YES

Horror Icon You Wouldn’t Expect They Could Get For This:     NONE

Pumpkinhead Smacks People With His Big Stupid Hands:      YES

Attempt at Appalachian Accents:                                              YEP

At All Watchable:                                                                       NOPE

*In fact, there’s reason to believe Pumpkinhead has gone through a gender change as well. Recall that Pumpkinhead regrows from the shrivelled corpse of the person who last raised him (this is confirmed in both the original and PUMPKINHEAD 3, and sort of confirmed in the possibly-not-canon BLOOD WINGS, which has the son of Pumpkinhead working for himself). And of course, we remember clearly that the last survivor of PUMPKINHEAD 3 was that brunette chick who was explicitly the one buried in Pumpkinhead island at the end. So although we don’t actually see Pumpkinhead’s resurrection this time around, we’re left to assume that he’s got a feminine side here, which probably explains his (her) much, much higher body count.

** So says wikipedia. IMBD claims they’re different people, but honestly that’s too good a story not to believe. He did direct a bunch of episodes of that show, so it’s not entirely ridiculous to imagine.

***Possibly more reason to take their claim that it was directed by Iolaus with a grain of salt

****Or while recording your debut album, which is where I first encountered it.

Alternate Perspectives: Alex on P3:A2A

In what may or may not be a continuing series, I've been conducting scientific experiments by exposing people who otherwise have excellent taste and judgement to the kind of genre crap which is my bread and butter but that most sane, emotionally mature people would never encounter of their own free will. So here's Alex on Pumpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes. Note that she classily cites the source for her visual illustration. As usual, she puts my attempts to shame:

When I sat down and realized I was about to watch PUMPKINHEAD : ASHES TO ASHES, two thoughts went through my head. The first one was, oh s*** the most I’ve spent thinking about PUMPKINHEAD was through reading previous PUMPKINHEAD reviews on this particular venue. The second one was, well, it’s a SyFy* made for TV move – I’m really not going to need to have logged some serious PUMPKINHEAD hours to “get it”. And so, thus began my journey into the depths of PUMPKINHEAD: ASHES TO ASHES – luckily for me those depths were all together pretty shallow.

The first five minutes had me thrown – I was convinced that my PUMPKINHEAD-less past was going to betray me and I would remain altogether lost – that is until Doug Bradley appeared. Despite the presence of the one and only Mr. Lance Henriksen in this film, Doug Bradley emerged from the beginning as the guiding light of evil; and ultimately his Doc Fraser became the plot’s touchstone. And if I may digress for a minute – this highlights a major problem with the entire film.

The plot, ostensibly a decently conceived sequel to the original, gets lost in the films inane attempts to flesh out its characters’ backgrounds. Take for example my favorite of Doc Fraser’s patients – Molly Sue Allen, played as an eager and neurotic blonde with a history of manic episodes. For entire 3 to 4 minute spans I would find myself mindlessly entwined in her backstory only to realize that I really didn’t care about what she had to do with our gourd-headed demon, and was much more interested in finding out what was bothering my poor little Molly Sue.

Molly Sue seeks vengeance.  http://media.monstersandcritics.com/articles/1284709/article_images/mollysueaskstheoldwitchforvengance.jpg

Molly Sue aside, the gist of the story focuses on the average residents of a non-descript rural-ish town who fall prey to the crooked workings of a nasty organ harvesting doctor. They then work together and seek vengeance through demon beckoning – which then backfires on them as they find Mr. Pumps killing spree to be taking a pretty brutal toll on their own souls. As an overall plot – this is pretty solid, and if the whole screenplay had been written with fleshing this plot out in mind – the film would’ve been much better served. Unfortunately though, it tried to dive into too many side stories, to the point where one time when Pumpkinhead showed up I actually said out loud “Oh yeah, this is what this movie is about.”

If it weren’t for Doc Fraser’s appearance in and relationship to all of the subplots, I really would have forgotten that I was watching a movie and not a string of random YouTube video excerpts featuring a bizarre kind of pumpkinheaded demon and malpractice suit worthy doctor. In fact, given Pumpkinheads appearance (not too scary, to say the least) it seems pretty possible that he was just the victim of a botched attempt to steal organs. But when all is said and done… I’m pretty excited to see BLOOD FEUD.

*Recognizing that this actually premiered in the good old days of the SCIFI channel – I feel I am honor bound by society to ALWAYS refer to that channel as SyFy now…. Just so they can realize what horror they have wrought.

Pumpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes

Pumpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes (2006)
Dir. Jake West
Starring Doug Bradley, Douglas Roberts, Pumpkinhead, Tess Panzer, and Lance Henriksen

    OK, let’s get the bad out of the way first. This is the second sequel to a film which probably didn’t need a first sequel to begin with. And it managed to find an even less classy venue for premier than the first sequel’s early 90’s DTV dumping, arriving without fanfare on the SciFi channel a full 18 years after the original. So it’s not even direct to DVD, it’s direct-to-SciFi-Channel. And it was filmed in Romania, that Lost World of murky cheapo DTV crapola where Uwe Boll roams free and unfettered by logic or taste. AND, it was filmed back-to-back with another sequel (PUMPKINHEAD 4: BLOOD FEUD) to save money. AND it has a cameo from Lance Henriksen post-2000, when due to Bush’s election/ an evil gypsy curse Henriksen was legally prevented in appearing in any film which was A) Halfway watchable and B) going to include a role for him which lasted more than 5 minutes.

    So it’s got a lot going against it. Short of starring Lou Diamond Phillips or being produced by Paul W. S. Anderson, there’s not much more it could really do to clearly advertise that it’s going to be terrible. And yes, it is terrible. But actually it’s not nearly as terrible as it ought to be, given that pedigree. If you can get past the obvious, superficial ways in which it is a manifestly horrible movie, there’s actually some good stuff in there. Or at least, more good stuff than seems realistically likely for any movie titled PUMPKINHEAD 3 to have.

    To start with, it ignores the events of Jeff Burr’s unfortunate PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS. It can do this without fucking up the ever-important Pumpkinhead franchise continuity because, as you recall, the Pumpkinhead in PUMPKINHEAD 2 is actually not our beloved original Pumpkinhead, but actually a half-human transmogrifying Son-of-Pumpkinhead who just happens to look exactly like original Pumpkinhead. This movie, on the other hand, is a direct follow-up to the original PUMPKINHEAD, and includes both characters from the original and flashbacks to some key scenes. And it also resumes both the tone and the key conflict from the original, which as you’ll recall has Pumpkinhead summoned to do vengeance by furious hill people who eventually feel remorse and try to stop what they’ve set in motion.

No, you go on with your bad self.

    At first, though, you don’t see the connection. Because the film opens (somewhat awkwardly, it must be said) with a random fellah who happens to be walking through the deep backwoods late at night stumbling across a big scruffy yokel disposing of a body in a mud pit. Said yokel happens to be Bunt Wallace -- that’s right, the kid from the original PUMPKINHEAD who guided Henriksen’s Ed Harley character to his doom when his father refuses to sign off on this obviously bad idea. Bunt’s all grown up now --maybe a little worse for wear-- and his reward for his help all those years ago is that Ed Harley is still following him around, like a sexy Jacob Marley, advising him to give up his nefarious body-dumping ways. Bunt is a little bit slow, but he obviously still feels deeply guilty about leading a man to damnation in defiance of his father’s obviously better judgement. And Ed isn’t really helping matters by following him around, wearing all black, and somewhat ghoulishly pointing out to him how doomed he is.

    Now, stop and think -- this is actually a pretty cool twist on a sequel. It ties seamlessly into the original, and it takes an interesting but small aspect of the original and expands on it. It has some neat implications regarding guilt, and turns our original victim into a somewhat threatening figure. None of this is explored with much depth, but even on the superficial level it makes a somewhat interesting dynamic. There’s a million more interesting places they could have gone with the concept than the way they do go, but what the heck, at least it’s better than that Son-of-Pumpkinhead crap from part 2.

    Henriksen, returning to the role of Ed Harley, is fucking awesome just like you would expect. He’s offering good advice to Bunt, but there’s a kind of gleeful dark humor to his role, as if he’s honor-bound to try and set things right, but also taking a certain malevolent delight in fucking with this kid who was so instrumental in his own destruction.

He would have been a great villain, but remember, it’s after the year 2000 so Henriksen can only appear in a few short scenes. Instead, they’ve got another Iconic Horror Actor to antagonize those wacky hill people in the form of Doug “Pinhead” Bradley. I know, its weird that both PUMPKINHEAD sequels star various villains from HELLRAISER, not sure what’s up with that, but I like it. If they do another Pumpkinhead film (which obviously, they should) it should seriously star Sean Chapman. Besides, “Pinhead” and “Pumpkinhead” also sound weirdly similar, not to mention that “Pinhead and Pumpkinhead” would be an awesome name for a Beavis and Butt-Head sequel series*. Obviously, the lord works in mysterious ways.

Which is appropriate, because so does Doug Bradley’s “Doc Fraser” character, a small-town doctor who moonlights as an organ-harvesting ghoul. Let me tell you his plan, so you can see if this makes some kind of sense that somehow escaped me. Locals bring their deceased loved ones to the Bunt’s family crematorium for a good burnin’ and buryin’. They get a urn filled with ashes and walk off happy, not realizing that, in reality, Doc Fraser is stealing the corpses, removing the organs, selling them on the black market, and then having Bunt drag the mutilated carcasses out into the woods to dump them. I get the organ-thieving thing, in fact it sounds like a good idea (although I question how fresh those organs are once their relatives have schlepped the corpse up into the mountains for cremation). But there literally is an actual crematorium five feet from their evil organ-harvesting room. Why not just cremate the bodies afterwards instead of leaving them in the woods for people to find and be horrified by? It’s actually MORE work to dispose of them that way. And it causes issues when the local folks catch wind of the plan and find literally dozens of bodies stashed away in the woods. That in turn causes more issues when local unstable blondie Molly Sue flips out and summons Pumpkinhead for some good ol’ fashioned revengin’.

It's OK kids. Pumpkinhead is here for you.

Why cut right to Pumpkinhead and not call the local cops? Well, despite the fact that all the bodies that have been sent to the Wallace crematorium  in the last few years have turned up noticeably uncremated in the woods with the organs removed, the cops seem to not have any idea who could be responsible. Doc Fraser, examining the bodies, opines “I’m not even sure if what was done to these folks was a crime!” and the sheriff seems to take his word for it. Honestly, it seems like Pumpkinhead could be put to better use teaching these morons how to put two and two together, but Molly Sue isn’t the brightest bulb herself and so she just enlists some friends (relatives? what were they trying to do, get a bulk discount?) to go in on this Pumpkinhead vengeance deal with her and turns the thing loose on the whole town.

So finally we have a Pumpkinhead, and what do you know, it’s actually nice to see that pruney fucker again. He looks a little different than last time, clearly trying to put his best foot forward for the new century. For one thing, he’s sometimes a laughably ridiculous CG creation which looks about Sega Saturn quality. For another, his puppety spindles have been replaced by a dude in a big rubber suit which is redesigned in some subtle ways. I can’t lie, the CG would look embarrassing on an episode of “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.” But for some reason I kind of dig on the new design for the suit. He’s still kind of conceptually uninspired, but his new more blunted face looks vaguely alien and is nicely articulated by old-school animatronics. They also goose up the fun by finally giving the dude some decent gimmicky kills -- sure, he spends a good amount of time smacking people around with those big goofy hands of his, but he also ups his game by impaling someone on a weather vane, crushing a guy’s head through steel bars, stabbing someone with his tail (which I totally forgot he had, but looking back at the original, yup, it’s there). So, a little more hustle on the Pumpkinhead front than usual.

Obviously, the kids who swear revenge and summon Pumpkinhead are terrible, terrible actors, and not even in a fun overacting way. They’re just dull and bland. But Doug Bradley, in a rare non-Pinhead role, is actually a lot of fun as that corpse-stealing, meth-dealing pistol-toting, free-healthcare-providing not-so-great-at-planning lovable scamp Doc Faser. He dresses like an 19th century preacher, for one thing, and even though his corpse-disposal plan is open to some criticism you have to appreciate his more practical solution to his Pumpkinhead woes. Upon hearing the obligatory flashback from Bunt, he realizes that Pumpkinhead only perseveres as long as those who summon him remain alive. So, he grabs his pistol and sets out to kill everyone who sicked Pumpkinhead on him before he himself can be killed. It’s such a practical and proactive solution that he automatically becomes sort of a badass anti-hero and you start pulling for him. 

I'm your huckleberry.

Plus, Bradley turns out to be pretty darn charismatic when he’s not getting acupuncture’d from a place beyond limits where pleasure and pain are indivisible. His Appalachian Mountain accent is not exactly robust, but honestly considering everyone else in this turkey he’s probably the closest. You can bypass it by imagining a backstory where he’s actually a British immigrant who settled in Pumpkinhead territory and has picked up a slight twinge of local color. Which would also make sense, because Doc Fraser is a believer in socialized medicine. Turns out that all these organ shenanigans are actually a way to fund his free health care service. So he steals from the dead to give to the living. Guy’s basically a Grave-Robin Hood**. And, it turns out ol’ Pumpkinhead-summoning Molly Sue is given to “episodes” serious enough that the police don’t even get out of their chairs when she storms into the station screaming that there’s a dead body in her truck. Not exactly the most responsible person to be raising vegetable-themed demons of vengeance. So even though Fraser may be a murderous meth-dealing preacher-dressing-like body-snatching etc etc, there’s a nice little bit of moral ambiguity in there.

That’s the movie, really. It’s not great like it could be, but at it has more going for it than it should, by all accounts. Yes, it’s shot on shitty digital video which frequently looks like a cell phone camera. But they still manage to get some nice shots in there, and against all odds actually use the shitty quality of the “film” to enhance the brutally hard lighting and lend atmosphere to the inside of their squalid locations***. Yes, they could only get Lance Henriksen for a few hours of filming, but they use his obvious greatness to spice things up and add unexpected weight to the narrative. Yes, the movie looks like it cost less than a Mitt Romney haircut, but they make excellent use of some great location shots and milk their setpieces, when they do come, for all they’re worth. And yes, the acting can be pretty depressingly bad, but surprisingly the script isn’t a disaster at all. Doc Fraser has a nice little monologue about where pain comes from (the brain, he says) which actually pays off later in another exchange. There’s even an attempt to make some kind of metaphor out of the Ashes to Ashes thing. It doesn’t really quite pan out, but it’s nice to see them trying a little. And even though it doesn’t work, somehow it kind of does. There’s something about the bare, minimalist setting and noir-worthy hard light combined with the meth and ghosts and twisted forests and body snatching which gives the whole thing a perverse, nightmarish quality which is more than the sums of its individually weak parts.

The end result is like Pumpkinhead himself: sloppy, ungainly, not as cool as it ought to be. But gets the job done. Better than advertised, would summon again.

Two great tastes that taste great together.

           PUMPKINHEAD CHECKLIST:

Lance Henriksen:                                           YES

Bland And/or Irritating White Kids:                 SEVERAL

Satisfying Kills:                                               NOPE

Horror Icon You Wouldn’t Expect 
They Could Get For This:                              DOUG BRADLEY

Pumpkinhead Smacks People 
With His Big Stupid Hands:                           ALAS, YES

Attempt at Appalachian Accents:                  DISASTROUS

At All Watchable:                                           SURPRISINGLY, YES

* Or a FREDDY VS. JASON type crossover. Although frankly the mashup I really want to see is PINHEAD VS JIGSAW. It’d be the horror version of that scene from LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS with Steve Martin as the sadistic dentist and Bill Murray as the masochist patient. Except more British. And probably more de-limbing.  

** Haters gonna hate.

*** Oddly, Romania stands in for Appalachia somewhat well, and their use of real locations gives the whole thing a spartan, almost minimalist feel of isolation and decay.

Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings

Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1994)
Dir. Jeff Burr
Starring Andrew Robinson, Pumpkinhead, and Soleil Moon Frye of all fool people.

    Democracy is a flawed system of government. It can be schizophrenic, unresponsive, vulnerable to domination both by mob rule or by a small but powerful elite. Winston Churchill once said of Democracy, “...Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But it must be said, when the citizens rise up and make their needs heard, when they speak loudly and with one unified, undeniable voice, we are reminded that the power truly rests with the people. And by 1994, the people had spoken. It had been too long since they had seen their friend, Pumpkinhead. A massive grassroots organization sprang up, rallies were organized, petitions were circulated. 40 dedicated Pumpkinhead fans chained themselves to the lobby of the Motion Picture Organization of America. Then-president Bill Clinton found himself deluged through the mail with hundreds of pumpkins with his face carved on them along with vaguely threatening messages about what the result might be if Pumpkinhead was allowed to stay dead. America couldn't leave dead enough alone.

Finally, in early October 1994, President Clinton gathered his top aides and called a press conference in the Rose Garden. Surrounded by world leaders and cultural luminaries, with tears streaming down his face, Clinton addressed the nation with the news that our prayers had been answered, there would be a Pumpkinhead sequel. The Star Spangled Banner was played. Battle-hardened Generals wept like children, unashamed. Plans were quickly drawn up to carve Lance Henriksen’s face into the ancient rock of Mount Rushmore. Americans, as one, rushed into the streets and culminated the news with a night of celebration unequaled in this country’s --and perhaps the world’s -- long history. At dawn, they finally collapsed into bed (many, nay, most of them now pregnant after a wild night of frantic, hip-bruising orgiastic sex) secure in the knowledge that he would be back. The world seemed new again. As they drifted off into contented slumber, the last thing that passed through their minds was a date. October 19th. P-day. The next morning would see the run rise high in the sky, proud and fierce, over the dawning of a new golden age.

Or possibly some schmuck just bought the rights to the monster and had to make a movie out of it within 3 months before they expired. Which is actually I think slightly closer to what happened.

So OK, this was kind of a mercenary job. But I was still sort of excited to see it, and all because of one man: Jeff Burr. Sure, he spent most of his career directing terrible and deeply unnecessary sequels, including but not limited to STEPFATHER II, LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, PUPPETMASTER 4 and 5, THE WEREWOLF REBORN! and, I can’t believe I’m writing this, a horror film called THE TELLING which stars the ladies from the perversely popular dear-god-this-really-is-the-end-of-Western-civilization E! original series The Girls Next Door.

But, he also made one film which really surprised both me and Vincent Price with its high quality, the anthology film FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM. It was his first film, and it boasted a bunch of really top-notch performances, complemented by a rich Southern Gothic atmosphere and some imaginatively disturbing horror concepts. So honestly, it seemed like PUMPKINHEAD might be a good fit for the guy, with it’s timeless, folksy backwoods folklore and evocative Appalachian background. I liked all that stuff about the Stan Winston original, and thought a director who had a gift for exactly that kind of thing and less fixation on big rubbery special effects had a chance to make a really great sequel.

Pumpkinhead spends a surprising amount of his time walking through doorways.

Turns out, though, that this one is exactly as shitty as you might expect, and, predictably, for the exact reasons you’d probably expect. As Burr describes in this detailed and career-spanning interview, producer Brad Krevoy (producer of such varied material as DUMB AND DUMBER, PUMPKINHEAD 4, and ULEE’S GOLD) had randomly ended up with the keys to the Pumpkinhead kingdom, and needed to put them to use before they expired. Burr was brought on at the last minute to adapt a regular non-pumpkin-related horror script into a Pumpkinhead film, and the results is, in his own estimation, his worst film.

The opening sequence is actually pretty good. A bunch of 50’s greaseball preppies drive out into the woods and torture this deformed kid to death. John Gatkins (who you remember in the role of “Dishwasher” from FRED 2: NIGHT OF THE LIVING FRED) does a great job as the preppies’ leader, vicious and a little unhinged but obviously in control. But it doesn’t take long to see that this Pumpkin is rotten. Because it’s not long before we move to the present day and quickly come upon the PUMPKINHEAD series’ achilles heel: annoying college kids.

OK, so these college kids are actually high school kids even though they’re obviously pushing 30, but whatever, it’s a podunk redneck town (though not the same podunk redneck town as the first one -- this one is less Hill People and more Rednecks). The town just got a new Sheriff (Andrew Robinson, who at least looks awake if not exactly making a huge effort) and his infuriating daughter has already fallen in with a bad crowd of teenagers which is for some reason composed of 30-something LA sitcom actors who look more like guest stars from Saved By the Bell than rebellious redneck hoodlums. An odd artistic choice, I know, but maybe it’s a metaphor or something. One of them, incidentally, is Punky Brewster, and for some reason she’s a proud and outspoken Wiccan which one might imagine would go over poorly in this insular backwoods community. But then again, most people in town seem to be well-to-do, highly educated multiethnic LA actors, so I guess that’s probably my own prejudice coming through. Sure, these guys are all for slicing up deformed forest children, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cool with neighbors of all colors and creeds.

But, they should have been focusing more on their deformed-kid-killing problem first, as it turns out. Because just as killing an innocent black artist/heir to shoe fortune gets you a Candyman, so too does killing an innocent deformed forest child get you a Pumpkinhead. And again, a Pumpkinhead is hardly something to celebrate. I’m pretty sure it’s the same suite as before, and looks just as uninspired. But even though he looks the same, there’s a twist here -- its not the same Pumpkinhead! A more accurate title for this movie might be SON OF PUMPKINHEAD, because it turns out the deformed kid was actually the illegitimate spawn of the original Pumpkinhead and a random anonymous mortal woman (I’m thinking a lot of moonshine was involved that night). Through a convoluted process which involves the teens mistakenly burning the old witch’s house down and then for absolutely no reason digging up an unmarked grave, pouring magic blood on it, and reading random spells over it, the deformed forest kid comes back to life and turns into Pumpkinhead and heads out to get some god damn revenge on A) the preppies who killed him in the first place and B) the high school hoodlums who burned down the old Lady’s house and brought him back to life.

So it does have one advantage over the original, which is that we very much want to see these particular groups killed off. But in doing so it loses the central tragedy which made the original almost work, which is that to get Pumpkinhead to do your dirty work you have to give up your soul. This Pumpkinhead is working for himself, so there’s no moral ambiguity here. And while I’m always game to watch a big rubber monster eat a bunch of rednecks and/or 30-year-old highschoolers, I just can’t get too into this Pumpkinhead fellah. He looks silly*, he moves slow, and he doesn’t really kill all that good. He doesn’t have a signature weapon or anything and he’s just a big slow-moving puppet, so all he can really do is burst through doors while rave lights flash around him and then awkwardly whack the individual in question with those big goofy hands of his. Who has nightmares about getting slapped to death by a demon? Pretty middle-of-the-road monstering, in my opinion. Even Mansquito knows to throw in a few gimmicks here and there!

          

           Now with Karate Chop action! Dude looks like fucking Guyver:

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So Pumpkinhead is kinda a wash, and his backstory is now both more convoluted and less interesting. But of course the real loss here is the lack of Lance Henriksen. Horror staple Andrew Robinson (HELLRAISER, Scorpio from DIRTY HARRY) is a perfectly fine actor, but he mostly seems to serve as exposition and barely gets personally involved. I guess we're supposed to care about his daughter (generic blonde Ami Dolenz), but the first thing we see her do is lie to her father, followed by burning an old woman to death and covering it up, so I hope you'll forgive me for kinda siding with the Pumpkin Man on this one. So Robinson's a cold fish, his daughter and her friends are actively irritating, and without the strong central presence Henriksen brought to the original, the whole thing feels manufactured, plastic, and disposable. Robinson is supposed to be a big-city cop who has returned to his hometown for some peace of mind, but the town itself is vaguely described and never seems legitimately isolated or backwards. Everyone is clean and well-groomed, wearing the latest (1994) fashions, and even Bill Clinton’s brother Roger is the town’s jheri-curl-mulleted mayor (seriously). There seem to be a couple of farmers living on the edges of town, but it never for a second conjures that time-stands-still vibe that the original PUMPKINHEAD actually got pretty right. It’s a shame, because as a director Burr is definitely capable of better than this. To his credit, he throws in a couple of pretty shots here and there, but mostly the whole thing looks like it was shot in a few weeks (it was) and scripted, as Burr says, by people with “no real affection or affinity for the genre. It was really quite frankly not a good script, but it had to be shot by a certain date to retain the rights. Again, all the wrong reasons to make a movie.”

Reading the interview, it gets a little depressing to see how this poor guy, so full of good ideas, could never really get a break. Stranded in B-movie horror land, it usually seems like he was the only person actually interested in making a real movie. But that’s still no excuse for a sub-par PUMPKINHEAD sequel, so as penance he followed it up with arguably the best Scarecrow film ever, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW. That one gets right most of the things PUMKI2HEAD gets wrong, with significantly improved atmosphere, a nice legitimately rural feel, and an emphasis on genuine scares rather than monster effects. I still believe there’s a germ of genuinely good idea in this whole Pumpkinhead** thing, but to realize its full potential for the next sequel it’s gonna take people with both the steely artistic dedication and the resources to do something truly right.

Next week: Enter the SyFy channel.  

PUMPKINHEAD CHECKLIST:

Lance Henriksen:                                       NO

Bland And/or Irritating White Kids:             WORST EVER

Satisfying Kills:                                           ONE

Horror Icon You Wouldn’t Expect 

They Could Get For This:                           ANDREW ROBINSON

Pumpkinhead Smacks People 

With His Big Stupid Hands:                        CONSTANTLY

Attempt at Appalachian Accents:               BARELY

At All Watchable:                                        NOPE

*Actually I just realized he looks like that stupid Alien Hybrid at the end of ALIEN: RESURRECTION, so perhaps I was predisposed to be unimpressed and mildly irritated at the poor guy. Compare: 

**This marks the 24th occurrence of the word "Pumpkinhead" in this review.