Pumpkinhead
(1988) 86 min.
Rated: R
Country: USA
Director: Stan Winston
Starring: Lance Henriksen, Brian Bremer
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A man raises a legendary beast to seek revenge on the people who killed his son.
Synopsis:
Sometime in the old-timey past when people lived in the country and had no electricity, a family makes sure their door is shut. It is night and one of their neighbors is scrambling and looking for help. He is injured and desperate for anyone to open their door to him. He comes to the family’s door and begs for help.
The father of the household ignores the man outside and tells his wife to tend to their son. The sun gets up from bed and sneaks over to a window. He witnesses a monster grab the man outside. This is the end of the flashback scene.
Present day:
Ed Harley (Henriksen) is the owner of a small general store and lives with his small son and a dog. He generally lives a simple, but peaceful life.
One day the son presents his father with a crude hand-made necklace of yarn. At the end of the necklace is a stickfigure shape wrapped in yarn. Ed cherishes it and gives his son a hug.
Both son and father go to their store and start to set up shop for the day. Meanwhile, a group of vacationing rude college kids are driving by the store and decide to stop and pick up some supplies.
As they are there a local man, Mr. Wallace, stops by to pick up some supplies and feed for his animals. His children start taunting one of their own about how Pumpkinhead punishes bad people.
Mr. Wallace asks for a bag of feed, but Ed says he doesn’t have any now, but that he’d be able to drop some to their house, and so it’s agreed. Mr. Wallace leaves with his children.
The older college kids decide to ride their dirt bikes. As they are riding their bikes on a hill, Ed tells his son to watch the store for a bit as he has to go get the feed. While he is gone, the son starts to chase their dog Gypsy onto the hills where the dirt bikes are. The boy gets into the path of the bikes and is struck down by Joel and his bike.
Rather than help assist the injured boy Joel takes his bike back onto the car and drives off. He had been drinking a little and does not want to face any criminal charges. He speeds off to their log cabin as the other kids try to deal with the injured boy.
Ed arrives on the scene and carries off his son angrily without speaking to the kids. The rest of the kids go to the cabin. Unfortunately the boy dies in his arms. Ed drives into the nearby shanty town with his son’s body under a quilt and delivers the feed to Mr.Wallace.
He asks Mr. Wallace if he knows where an old woman is, but Mr.Wallace is reluctant to give any information. As Ed is about to leave one of Wallace’s sons, Bunt (Bremer), tells Ed that he knows about her. Ed offers him money and Bunt tells him that her name is Haggis and she lives in a nearby on Blackridge.
Ed travels down into Blackridge swamp and carries his boy with him to seek the advice of the Witch Haggis. She tells him that she can’t help the boy and Ed asks for the creature that seeks vengeance. She warns him that calling upon the creature comes at a price and instructs him to visit a place where people would bury their unwanted dead.
Ed goes on his way with a shovel and manages to find a large plot of earth surrounded by pumpkins. He digs a hole and pulls out a dirty malformed figure covered in worms and insects.
Meanwhile, the kids in the cabin were basically beaten into keeping quiet and not calling the authorities on Joel. He has a gun and is making sure none of them get him in trouble going so far as to lock two of them in the basement for a period of time.
Ed takes the creature to Haggis who takes some of his blood and the blood of his son and put them into the creature. While it rises to life, Ed falls over on the floor and experiences pain.
At the cabin, Pumpkinhead manages to pick off each of the kids one by one and kill each one of them except for Joel, Tracy and Chris.
Ed goes off and buries his son in the ground near where his mother was buried. While the kids are being killed at the cabin, Ed also sees this and experiences part of it, causing him to fall over in shock. He goes back to beg for the witch to stop Pumpkinhead as he was unaware of how brutal the murders would be, but she simply says “it’ll pass. Let it finish.” Ed vows to stop the monster himself.
After having seen his girlfriend Kim get pulled away by Pumpkinhead, Joel and the other two decide to seek help. They run into the shanty town and try calling on people for help, but they’re ignored. They finally try to open a truck, but a man tries to scare them off with a gun, telling them that no one can help them and that they’re marked.
Of course, right at that time, Pumpkinhead appears. The man with the gun goes away and Ed appears shooting Pumpkinhead in the shoulder. Ed then shoots the monster again, knocking it over. It lies still and motionless. At this point Joel ignores the advice of his friends and assures them that the monster is dead.
It is not, however, and proceeds to shove a gun through his chest, killing him.
Tracy and Chris begin to bang on doors asking for help and are, understandably ignored. Bunt, however, hears their cries and is determined to help them and to see Pumpkinhead for himself. He manages to escape his house and find Tracy and Chris. He tells them to go to a burnt down church, that it may be safe there.
Bunt leads the two to the church ruins. Bunt explains that Pumpkinhead is summoned to take vengeance on someone who has wronged someone else. Tracy explains that Joel accidentally killed Ed’s son. Pumpkinhead then appears and enters the church. Bunt and the others flee out the back as Pumpkinhead slowly walks through the church.
Pumpkinhead catches Chris and throws him against a tree. He drags Chris to Ed’s house. Tracy, Bunt and Ed have been hiding there. Tracy pleads with Ed to call off the monster and Ed tells her nothing can call it off.
Ed puts on a flamethrower, determined to kill the monster. As he goes outside to attack the monster he accidentally impales his arm on a pitchfork, which causes the monster pain. The monster’s face changes a bit to that of Ed’s and Ed’s face to that of the monster.
Just as Pumpkinhead is about to attack Tracy, Ed shoots himself in the head. This causes the monster to drop Tracy. The bullet only grazed Ed’s head so the monster starts to attack Bunt. But Tracy gets the gun and after some coaxing from Ed, shoots him enough times to kill him, therefore killing the monster.
The monster bursts into flames after it dies.
We see Haggis bury Ed back in the spot where the original Pumpkinhead body was found. Around the Ed’s neck is the small necklace that his son gave him.
Review:
I think this movie did fairly well when it came out. The story is somewhat of a cautionary tale both to stupid college jocks who are careless and try to run away from responsibility and to people who wish death as a form of vengeance. Both sides of the story ended up pretty badly off.
I couldn’t help but notice how “Alien”-like Pumpkinhead’s design was. Part of me wanted to dismiss the movie outright just for that alone. It had the Giger elongated head, bony shoulders, long tail and basically the structure of the Alien monsters without being black and as detailed.
This movie is fairly entertaining, though it does kind of lull in some areas and I thought that the death of the majority of the kids happened really quickly. Why have a large cast if you can’t develop that aspect of the movie more? If you’re going to kill them all off in one or two scenes, maybe you should’ve started with a smaller cast to begin with.
Aside from that, there is generally okay acting and the effects were pretty good for the era. Lots of dramatic atmosphere, lightning flashes, cicada noises and leaves blowing whenever the monster appeared.
For some reason the MGM DVD release of this movie did not contain English subtitles. It did, however, contain French and Spanish subtitles.