pumpkinhead | BLOODCRYPT

Pumpkin Head 4 – Blood Feud: D

20 years after the original graced audiences with it’s campy presence, Pumpkinhead is back to exact revenge for another hate filled young man. The movie starts off generically enough as two guys on motorcycles are running from Pumpkinhead only to be trapped in a cabin. In this cabin they meet the man who called Pumpkinhead back to earth from hell, and we learn that the only way to kill Pumpkinhead is to kill the vessel which brought him to earth. This obviously becomes a key point later in the film, but we also get to meet Ed Harley (Lance Henrikson) who pops in throughout the movie to explain to the audience the internal logic of Pumpkinhead and how to kill it.

In the next scene we flash forward five years which seems strange given that the types of cars driven and the fashion sense on the people on screen would make me believe that we flashed back to the early eighties instead. Anyway we pick up in the midst of a feud between the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s (Literally. That is how unoriginal they are), and the McCoy’s end up killing one of the teenage Hatfield sisters. Well this pisses off older brother Hatfield so he calls forward Pumpkinhead to exact revenge, despite the pleas of Lance Henrikson and his melted face.

From here we get people from LA providing the worst fake southern accents I have heard in a while, and Lance Henrkison looking like melted candle in his 4 minutes of screen time. The Pumpkinhead monster alternated between looking like a claymation puppet from a 60′ sci fi movie, and a mediocre beast formed out of paper mache. The kills are many and are well done considering how stupid Pumpkinhead looks, and the plot moved at a decent enough pace to keep the viewer interested between Pumpkinhead related maulings.

If you are a follower of the series or some kind of bizarre Lance Henrikson fan it is worth a watch.

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.