Day Five: Pumpkinhead (1989)
Another trip down memory lane here. I remember seeing Pumpkinhead on VHS with my father more or less as soon as it was released. I was constantly casing the video store (remember those?) for new releases, particularly in the horror genre. I was young so forgive the amount of time it may have taken me to realize that new movies hit the shelves the same day every week.
I remember the Pumpkinhead of Pumpkinhead as a huge, spidery, vine riddled agent of destruction. Not quite. Particularly when you compare him to the CG beasties of today, Pumpkinhead is a rather quaint man in a costume, a less specific Alien costume to be exact. As usual our imagination pumps up something in retrospect, but I wasn’t really disappointed to revisit this creature. I found him, and the movie, rather endearing.
Lance Henriksen is our lead, a leathery backwoods man who, as a child, gets an early education in the titular demon. Many years later, as an adult, Henriksen finds himself in the unenviable position of contracting Pumpkinhead’s services, and even novices of the genre can see that this will probably be a mistake.
Henriksen is, of course, a genre pro, a real man who invests characters that usually haven’t been given much on the page with a poignant, charged world weariness. He looks like a tough guy, and he’s played the tough guy before, but there’s usually a hesitation to Henriksen’s characters. He seems like the kind of guy who sits and drinks a beer in the roughest bar imaginable, but is reading a book in the corner, and isn’t being bothered. It’s a mild injustice if Henriksen has somehow managed to go his entire career up until this point without being asked to play the scene I just described.
Pumpkinhead was directed, in his debut, by special effects master Stan Winston, and his affinity for the genre shows. The film doesn’t feel calculated or impersonal like a random hack ’em up. The film’s atmosphere is over stylized (though effective) but imbued with a sense of passion. Winston likes Pumpkinhead, whether he be a vengeance demon or a misunderstood creature pulled out of a graveyard in the deepest, darkest nook of the woods.
The film isn’t too good, and the subjects of Pumpkinhead’s ire are as embarrassingly performed as the kids in your worst Jason movie. The film was obviously shot on very limited means with long passages of characters walking around because you know that’s all the crew could afford to shoot. But there are moments, such as Henriksen telling his dead wife that he’ll get revenge, or a few moments between Henriksen and a fellow woodsman who knows Pumpkinhead’s secret, that stick.
June 17th, 2008 at 5:56 am
[…] also directed two pictures: Pumpkinhead and A Gnome Named Gnorm. The second picture remains unseen by me, but Pumpkinhead, despite having […]