Andy's horror review: Pumpkinhead

Although I haven’t been out in days, I can tell it’s summer because a squirrel just spontaneously combusted outside my window. It’s hotter than some Southern cliche I can’t seem to think of right now, folks –- I can’t recall anything because the temperature boiled my thought organ ... mind piece ... brain. Whatever. To ignore the hellish outside world, I’ve decided to catch up on all the obscure/glossed over/utterly mediocre horror movies I missed out on this past semester. Over the course of the summer, I’ll review one each week and put a delightful little humorous spin on it. Comedic gold, I say!

Be forewarned, these will contain a variety of spoilers, so if you’d prefer to find out who dies when and how on your own, read no more. 

Now, without further ado:

Film No. 1: “Pumpkinhead,” a little gem from 1988 featuring that star of stars, Lance Henriksen. 

You may remember him best from roles in such films as “Super Mario Bros.: The Movie,” “Man’s Best Friend” (a movie about a murderous cyborg dog from the looks of it, although I didn’t care enough to find out), as well as the straight-to-DVD release “The Mangler 2.” The first Mangler film centered on a possessed, vengeful industrial washing machine; an idea so mind-numbingly stupid, they decided to make a sequel just to make sure it couldn’t get any worse. I assume they were proven horrifically wrong. 

Anyway, Henriksen actually played Bishop the android in “Aliens” and “Alien 3,” and they are pretty alright, so you might know him from those.

“Pumpkinhead” is a film about a decent, hardworking, insanely-ripped farmer (Henriksen), who loves nothing better than to chop wood shirtless in the mid-day sun in front of his myopic, overalls-sporting little son. They even have a scrappy little pup named Gyp. Sweat glistening off his toned bod, Henriksen pauses occasionally to tell his beloved boy some delightful little anecdote, often ending in a slightly racist or homophobic punch line which farmer, son and pup will laugh and laugh at together. OK, I made that last part up, but I think it’s probably in the director’s cut.

Things just couldn’t get better for Henriksen and his progeny. That is, of course, until dastardly teenage, dirt-bike-riding city folk show up to do what they do best: ride dirt bikes and behave dastardly. 

Oh, poor little myopic Henriksen, Jr.! He just couldn’t stay in the house like his papa told him to! 

As the teenage hooligans ride their bikes on what appears to be a very nicely kept BMX track in the middle of nowhere, little H. runs out into their path precisely at the wrong time. Junior gets flattened, hooligans and their hooligan girlfriends flee, and Bishop the android must manually reprogram the launch codes for the orbiting space freighter in order to save the marines before the terraforming colony’s nuclear core melts down.

Wait, no. I’m confusing horror movies featuring special effects by Stan Winston from the ‘80s.

Instead, Henriksen follows a local witch’s instructions (prefaced with the obligatory “You’re gonna regret this” speech) and digs up some malformed corpse child, drips blood onto it and resurrects the demon Pumpkinhead to exact revenge on the fleeing punk kids.

Which Pumpkinhead does, of course, in style. Despite everything else, the monster effects in this are pretty cool, and it’s fun to watch P-Head dispatch cowering teens in a variety of ways. I say “variety of ways,” but really this just means dropping them from trees at varying heights. He does that a fair amount, as well as impales a guy with a rifle, demonstrating that demons aren’t schooled in the proper uses of firearms.

Eventually there’s one girl left with a local country boy to help her escape the demon, and just as P-Head seems to be closing in on them, Henriksen has a change of heart, shows up and defeats the monster. 

Not that his change of heart comes from learning that violence only begets violence and revenge is a primitive and crass form of justice, but from the fact that he experiences all the pain that the teenagers do when they are tossed from treetops. 

So really, he’s still kind of a jerk. Oh, and he kills the Pumpkinhead by killing himself. Because (of course) he has to.

All in all, “Pumpkinhead” isn’t too bad of a horror flick, if only because the titular demon looks pretty awesome. 

Despite being R-rated, there really isn’t anything too graphic in it, something I thought would come naturally with the “vengeful hellspawn” plotline. 

In any case, the aforementioned witch’s name is Haggis, which also happens to be the name of a Scottish dish involving various sheep parts stuffed and boiled inside a sheep’s stomach. I don’t know if “Pumpkinhead” is therefore some meta-commentary on Scotland’s sovereignty and heritage, but I’ll take it as such. 

Blame my reasoning on heat stroke.