Punpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes (2006): C+

Hendrickson was cool enough to do Pumpkinhead 1, then he was too big to do Pumpkinhead 2, then he got washed up enough to do Pumpkinhead 3, which happens to be a SCI-fi original series, which usually means automatic shitfest. PHATA wasn’t that bad, relatively speaking; PH2: “Bloodwings” was so goddamn dumb that I treat it like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Turtles in Time and pretend that it never happened.

This film is more like the first film in that there is a small town and a “deal with the devil” setup that summons Pumpkinhead to get his vengeance-based killing spree on.  Just like before, when the townsfolk start to realize what they’ve gotten themselves into, ol’ Pumpkinhead is well into his massacre and they see that they can’t do anything about it except hope that he doesn’t give them a back-breaker.

They actually get a dude dressed up in an elaborate costume to slaughter people instead of rendering a CGI PH for the whole movie, which was good. The CGI parts look CGUgly. Which was bad. Like “how did they have the audacity to show us that?” bad. There is this one scene where he’s climbing up the side of a church and it looks like a Windows ’95 screensaver.

The make-up was really good for a made-for-TV flick like this and the gore was unrelenting and surprisingly graphic. You’d have fun watching it with people. He’s called “Pumpkinhead,” why? His head doesn’t look like a pumpkin. If anything, it looks like the head of a rancor with a little extra skull space. In PHATA, they make him smile a lot like he is really into all the slaughter. So, a happy rancor.