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Pumpkinhead (1988)

Reviewed by Carl
Posted on August 30, 2005 
Filed Under Monsters, Slashers

I’m in a real bind trying to review Pumpkinhead, primarily because it had the potential to be so much better it turned out to be. Stan Winston is one of the finest special effects guys going (think The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Edward Scissorhands) and Pumpkinhead marked his directorial debut, a point obvious from many of its strengths. The atmospherics of the first half of the movie are simple but effective, with the loving relationship between Ed Harley and his son Billy touched off nicely by the idyllic charm of their rural life. Lance Henriksen puts in the kind of polished performance that you’d expect from him, filling out the well written character with enough depth to allow him to pull off the (at times agonising to watch) fall into madness caused by the killing of his son. Though in appearance and form it is inescapably a run of the mill offering, Winston offer us a real moral test when Henriksen turns to a hagged old woods-woman/with for vengeance. It is clear that everything in the film has been building up to this; Winston frames it excellently, with the sunny and carefree plains of the first half of the film turning into shadowy and unsettling woods for the second half, marking well Henriksen’s fall from grace.

At this point, just as things are getting really interesting, Winston gets lazy and reverts back to the theory that served him well when he worked on Alien – the scarier and more bizarre looking the monster, the better. Unlike Alien though, he does nothing to sustain the tension that comes not with actually seeing the monster but with knowing it is there and not seeing it. This is a real shame, because he’d done everything right in paving the way for the arrival of the demonic Pumpkinhead. The viewer at this stage is intrigued with seeing if Harley’s hatred of his son’s killers is enough to circumvent his kind nature and allow him to go ahead with his compact with evil more than it is with seeing a gang of teenagers get ripped apart.

What we get instead is a sudden and disappointing reversion to a standard monster slasher movie, with the creature in question even looking like a cheap version of Alien. All the empathy that the audience had with Henrisken disappears in a flash, though he does his best to keep things on an even keel and his performance gets stronger as the rest of the movie falls away beneath him. As it resorts to clichés there isn’t enough to keep the audience onside and Harley’s realisation of what he has to do to save both his son’s killers and, ultimately, himself, now seems out of place instead of coming across as the kind of act of redemption that would have fitted in nicely with the first half. Pumpkinhead is more interesting than many of the offerings of this period but Winston really lets the side down with his tired and badly rendered finale. In many ways this paved the ways for the awful Pumpkinhead 2, which again missed the point of the true message of the original and further muddied its worthy points.

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