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The life of a horror movie franchise mascot can be a long and treacherous. Sometimes it takes years for filmmakers to nail things down, like Friday the 13th (not a trace of hockey masks until at least 3 movies in). Other times they figure it out right away but end up running out of material to pack it with, like we saw with A Nightmare on Elm Street. Sometimes you’re Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and in hindsight you were way better off not being a franchise at all. The point is that movies in general are hit-or-miss, and the chances of hitting upon a concept with some serious staying power is like winning the lottery. Even in horror, the genre that is infamous for endless sequels, true immortals are a rare breed. For every A-lister that’s been spawned since the dawn of horror cinema, there an endless amount of has-beens, never-weres and also-rans. For every Michael Myers, there are 2 or 3 Evil Bongs collecting dust in the bargain.
And then there’s Pumpkinhead.
There’s some parts of America that seem to have been untouched by the hand of modernity. Places where a middle-aged single dad like Ed Harley (played by Lance Henriksen of all people) can raise a son entirely on the proceeds of a single run-down general store in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. Of course this is a horror movie, and we all know that the boonies are like catnip to irresponsible white yuppies who are looking to screw around and get wasted. However, when that irresponsibility ultimately leads to deadly consequences and avoided responsibility, there is a debt that needs to be repaid. You see when a man is wronged by another man in such a dire way, you don’t go to a sheriff to seek justice, you don’t look for a court to deliberate on laws. You grab yourself a shovel, go digging around in an old pumpkin patch/defiled graveyard, and get a hillbilly swamp witch to revive a demon from the depths of hell to go on a killing spree of those that have been marked for death (in the Catskills at least, Rocky Mountains might be a bit different). Which is exactly what Ed Harley does, but how does buyer’s remorse work when it comes to Pumpkinhead? How do you stop vengeance birthed from the pit and fed by the blood of the wronged? Hopefully swamp witches accept returns with a valid receipt, for all of our sakes.
Unlike films like Halloween or Friday the 13th, which got a lot of mileage out of quiet dudes with masks, the folks over at Pumpkinhead decided to bet it all on black and dropped the budget on the titular monster. This decision is a mixed success. While Pumpkinhead does indeed look incredibly fucking cool (if you ever wanted to know what a fusion dance between a Xenomorph and the Eraserhead baby here’s your chance), with an impressive level of facial articulation, but it seems to come at the cost of almost everything else. Pumpkinhead doesn’t like to move and he doesn’t like to interact with things if he doesn’t have to, and while that’s understandable given the circumstances, it does mean the film is unfortunately relegated more to implied violence rather than actually showing it. Aside from a juicy scene involving a steel rod I believe, most of the action of this movie is dedicated to unseen hands dragging a character offscreen, and the deaths just sort of happen. It’s something you don’t really notice in similar movies, like An American Werewolf in London or Alien, but is really noticeable here. Pumpkinhead seems less like the anchor for a horror movie and more like a museum exhibit.
Of course, the reason why we don’t notice these things about Alien and do with Pumpkinhead is because Alien has a good movie wrapped around it, and P-head really does not. Far be it from me to decry a horror movie for a predictable plot, but that doesn’t earn it any points either, and neither does its flat characters and its so-so acting. There’s definitely a certain novelty in seeing Bishop from Aliens affecting a southern drawl, and the locations they got are beautiful (even if Stan Winston apparently believes that they’re literally still filled with people from the 1920s), but that novelty isn’t enough to carry a whole movie. Especially if they’re not even going to bother giving us the Lance Henriksen dueling banjos scene that we all dreamed about.
Pumpkinhead is a resounding shrug of a movie. There’s some potential hidden in there, especially if you have a phobia of things that look like an oiled up fetus, but by 1988 there was a ton of movies that did things better than Pumpkinhead, and that number has only increased with time. I’m not gonna say that there’s no enjoyment to be had with this one, but it’s probably not going to be the highlight of your scary movie night.
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