Late-80's Hallo-Watch: Pumpkinhead (1988)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stan Winston

I wasn't expecting Pumpkinhead (1988) to be good.  

Yet, I'd always meant to watch this movie.  I remember being 13 and the ad came on for "Pumpkinhead" and my brother and I looked at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed.  To this day, it sounds like naming a horror movie "Taters n' Gravy" to me.*

Pumpkinhead  looks good, but for Stan Winston's directorial debut, it's an awkward, tedious slog through flat characters and half-cooked ideas.  It's an 84 minute movie that has you looking at your watch and wondering when all of these people will be dispatched by the creature so you can finish the film.

The basic plot:  Lance Henriksen plays a guy in what I guess is maybe Appalachia? but is clearly the ranches outside of LA.  Some 20-somethings planning a weekend of riding dirtbikes(?) stop off at a fruit stand(?) and then go riding.  There's an accident and Henriksen's kid is killed by one of the bikers who jumps right into him.  

The guy who does the killing makes his group of 6 take-off where they have a sort of confrontation, and Jeff East - the guy who played young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie! - and he squabble because the guy seems like he's going to kill everyone here to cover up the fact he killed the kid...  So the group more or less splinters.

Henriksen makes contact with a witch-type lady who has him bring forth Pumpkinhead, so he can get revenge.  And revenge it gets, generically picking people off, while the real idea is to slowly reveal more and more of the suit Stan Winston's team made, that is, in fact, pretty good.  By the last 1/5th of the film, we're seeing the suit in full glory, and it looks neat!

By this point, Jeff East and his girlfriend are obviously going to make it, and we've come to understand the cost of raising a Pumpkinhead is that you and it will be sort of symbiotic when it's convenient to the scene.

I don't know.  It's a slog and I didn't care for it.  But it's also not a movie people love - and yet, several sequels happened.  Stan Winston kept making cool effects but went on to direct A Gnome Named Gnorm, making children everywhere understand that sometimes God abandons you, and the evidence is everything about Gnorm the Gnome.  

*But the lasting legacy of the movie's title in my head is that...  my poor dad was in the room for the commercial at some point, and being shitty kids, we said "hey, that's your new name, Dad!  Pumpkinhead!"  And, lo, that lasted about a year before I became aware that deploying the name "Pumpkinhead" one more time guaranteed a foot connecting with my ass.