Pumpkinhead

    The most impressive thing about ‘Pumpkinhead,’ and the thing that surprised me the most, is that it’s actually a pretty strong morality tale dressed up as a monster movie. Purely on its merits as a horror film it’s just above average, with some very impressive special effects brought down by a lack of clear, confident direction and an underwritten script, understandable in a first time director. The bedrock themes of the story it’s telling are surprisingly consistent and well thought out. While the dialogue and character work in the script need several more rewrites and a lot more room to breathe someone at least gave this story a spine.

He does not, in point of fact, have a pumpkin for a head.

    Released in 1988 ‘Pumpinkhead’ is the directorial debut of Stan Winston. Not being that big into the more technical aspects of special effects I of course knew the name but it wasn’t until I did a little bit of looking into him that I realized exactly how important and influential he was. His work on ‘The Thing’ alone would have cemented his place in effects history but he was also instrumental in the first two ‘Terminator’ movies, ‘Aliens,’ ‘Jurassic Park,’ and too many more to mention, eventually earning four Academy Awards and many more nominations. The man was at the peak of his craft. Rather unfortunately that craft was not direction. While not an embarrassing effort there’s a reason he only ever went on to direct one other feature film.

    The titular Pumpkinhead, only ever called such by children, is your basic vengeance demon with a price tag higher than anticipated. It’s not much more than a straightforward “be careful what you wish for” premise but for a horror movie it manages to keep to that premise and stick the landing. A lot of the so-called ‘rules’ of horror movies (looking at you, ‘Scream’) were really just in-jokes by genre fans and if you go back and watch the movies that supposedly codify those rules they’re very rarely consistent. Things like “sex equals death” and the like, these rules were never in place for the actual filmmakers. Nor did a killer’s motives or abilities ever really need to make sense, it would vary from scene to scene depending on the necessary scare. At least that was the case in the 80’s when this movie was made, the better ones have grown up a bit since then.

    The premise of the movie is a bit, let’s be kind and say thin. It opens in 1957 in the deep rural country. A family is going to bed, casting scared glances at the shadows, when a man comes banging at their door for help from the thing that’s chasing him because of what he did to that girl. The family refuses and he runs off, quickly taken by a gangly monster, watched from a window by the young boy of the family. Cut to 1988 when the boy has grown into Lance Henriksen, who as always gives a better performance than the movie deserves. He’s now raising his own boy alone as a widower, running a small roadside vegetable stand.

    Enter the city folk, and here’s where the thin characterization really starts to become a problem. There are three couples, three men and three women, and over the course of the film they start getting killed off, but except for one or two they’re not established enough for us to really even keep track, much less care. There’s one woman who spends so much of her screen time crying on a couch I kept forgetting she existed. The city folk are on some kind of vague vacation involving off-road motorbiking and about eight and a half minutes after being introduced they’ve accidentally killed Henriksen’s kid. All but one run off, a man who stays to inform the father of what’s happened.

    Henriksen gathers up his boy and goes to see the local witch while the city folk gather at the cabin they’ve apparently rent and argue about what to do. Turns out the one who killed the kid already has a DUI and is worried about going to prison. The interesting thing is that before the vengeance demon ever becomes a factor the city folk have all calmed down and decided to turn themselves over the police so if Henriksen had done nothing at all he still would’ve seen justice done.

    Instead he takes his son to see the witch who flatly states she can’t do anything to help him. I was paying attention to the words people were saying at this point, having already noticed the fairly pointed moral story on display, so I noted that it’s the angry father who first brings up the vengeance demon to the witch. She doesn’t so much as hint at its existence before then. She flatly states it can be done but it’s going to cost him everything. He pays her in jewelry, again at no prompting from her, and asks what he needs to do. She sends him off to dig up a corpse from the local spooky cemetery. He does and brings back a small, wizened mummy of a thing. She cuts his hand and the hand of his boy and pours the blood on the corpse. It instantly starts to inflate and stir back to life and the witch curtly sends Henriksen on his way.

    This is 20 minutes into an 86 minute movie, the one thing you can’t accuse this thing of is moving slowly. The demon immediately moves on the city folk and the first person it takes out is the one person who did the right thing, who stayed with his boy until his father came. It’s clear that this is about vengeance, not justice. Henriksen feels it as the demon kills him and his girlfriend and immediately regrets his actions, gasping in horror. He shakes it off and goes home, having apparently decided to endure it, before the demon attacks another person. He immediately goes back to the witch and demands she call it off. She says she can’t and asks him what in the world he expected would happen, that it would be easy? She rather accurately calls him a fool. He vows to stop the demon himself and the witch says he’ll fail and end up in Hell all the quicker.

    The rest of the movie plays out like you’d expect, the remaining city folk keep running from the demon as it picks them off, Henriksen shows up a couple of times to try to stop it, the connection between him and the demon becomes more and more evident until it’s basically wearing his face as it moves to kill the last few people. Henriksen discovers that if he’s hurt it hurts the demon too so he shoots himself in the head. He’s not quite dead, though, and begs the last remaining woman to finish him. She does and the demon falls dead. The movie ends with the witch taking up Henriksen’s corpse and burying it in exact same spot in the cemetery from which he’d dug up the demon earlier. Subtle this movie isn’t, but I liked that.

Seriously, this thing is a jerk.

    What I’ll end on is noting again that the demon effects are great. In too many shots it’s clearly just a man in a suit but the facial animatics are top-notch. It keeps cutting away from people getting killed to the demon grinning to itself, clearly enjoying itself. A few times it goes out of its way to taunt people or keep them alive longer than necessary just to draw out the suffering. In addition to being a vengeance demon this thing is a straight up asshole as well.

    There’s a reason this had ended up something of a cult classic. It did lukewarm business in theaters but as so often does with better-than-average genre fair it picked up a second life through home rentals. Aside from the effects work there’s nothing super special about it. I would’ve like more craftsmanship in the script and production design but it’s a monster movie with a solid beginning, middle, and end and tells the story it wants to tell. As I’m starting to learn that’s not something you can just assume all movies are going to have.