Pumpkinhead (1988)

[Editor’s Note: This is the first review from someone who I hope will be a regular contributor to this site, a writer/movie watcher that I have full confidence in, who I will namedrop as soon I make sure she’s okay with that, until then, please enjoy this review of Pumpkinhead!]

Pumpkinhead is a cautionary tale if ever there was one. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, quite the opposite, it knows what it wants to be and does it pretty well. The overarching theme of the movie being “don’t seek vengeance because it doesn’t get you anywhere”, and while some movies might’ve made that a cheesy wholesome everyone learns a lesson in the end type bullshit, Pumpkinhead goes darker with it. Not everyone learns from their mistakes, and sometimes even if you realize you’re wrong it’s too late to change the actions you’ve set in motion.

In the list of things Pumpkinhead does well, establishing the monster is at the top of the list. There’s something to be said about letting an audience learn from context clues instead of blatantly spelling out every single detail in painstaking exposition. We learn in the very first scene some crucial information just from watching the Harley family prepare. The small family farm they have gets quickly fortified by the father; who locks his car doors, puts the horse in the barn, and barricades everyone inside the house in stony silence. He sits by the door with a shotgun and waits. We, the viewers, don’t have to wait long to see who’s being hunted and what’s hunting him. There’s a brief exchange between the unmovable Mr. Harley and the hunted, and then, BAM, Pumpkinhead’s first appearance.

From this scene alone you can get most of the information we need about the monster. It’s not a new occurrence, we don’t see the Harley’s scared as long as they stay out of it, so we can extrapolate that it’s been in these hills before. It has something to do with vengeance, the hunted man mentions “I didn’t kill that girl” in the brief conversation, so we can assume they’re connected. Lastly, once what’s his face is killed the monster slinks off, leading us to the realization that once the target is dead then the monster goes bye bye. Let me tell you, after the movies I’ve been watching recently, it was refreshing to not be spoon fed details.

Very brief plot synopsis, Ed Harley (who was a child in that first scene) has a son, Billy, who he loves and that’s about all he’s got going for him. There’s an unfortunate accident where some city kids are vacationing in the country, accidentally hit Billy with a dirtbike and cause his death. Ed Harley seeks out a witch to invoke Pumpkinhead to kill the teens in a brutal act of vengeance. Chaos ensues.

The group of teens is pretty big to focus on all at once, but the movie does a good job of giving them all distinct personalities and wardrobe choices so they never get confused with one another. We have Chris, who’s clearly a rich boy trying to be tough. Joel, a scummy douchebag, who I was honestly rooting to die all movie. Kim, Joel’s enabler significant other. Steve, Joel’s younger brother who while trying his best more often than not gets sucked into Joel’s mishaps. Tracy, the plucky photographer, who not only has a heart of gold but also massive brass balls. Last but not least, we have Maggie, a girl who’s really religious and clearly has never dealt with tragedy before because she immediately turns into a crying wreck.

If you haven’t watched the movie yet, you should definitely leave a comment with your guesses on who lives through until the end.

Pumpkinhead, although he looks vaguely like the xenomorphs from Alien, is a distinctly strange and nightmare feuling monster. He’s genuinely scary looking, with weird emaciated limbs and a prehensile tail. The way he kills the teenagers gets pretty out there too. This isn’t just an animal who’s going to be thrown off by some clever trickery, it’s intelligent and has no qualms about impaling someone through the chest with a gun. Which I was honestly kind of stoked about.

We’re getting into spoiler territory here people, but this is important, so I’m gonna talk about it. An element that made Pumpkinhead even better story wise but might have affected it’s overall appeal was the monster’s changing face. The first few scenes we see Pumpkinhead facing the camera, he has the same terrifying wrinkly, emaciated, vaguely praying mantis type face. As the movie continues though, the monster’s face begins to change slightly until it becomes entirely unrecognizable to the original version. So much so, that originally I thought they’d had to do reshoots and somehow the puppet had gotten damaged, until I realized that it was intentional. You see Ed Harley’s face a second after you see the ever slowly transforming Pumpkinhead, and I realized this whole time they’d been giving three separate types of visual cues as to how the movie was going to end but I had been interpreting them incorrectly.

Throughout the rampage we get interspersed shots of Ed Harley seeing through the monster’s eyes what’s happening. Which, more often than not, are enough to completely override whatever Ed was trying to do. We see that pain translates between Ed Harley and Pumpkinhead, if it’s a scratch or a gunshot both of them feel it. We can make the connection that when Haggis the Witch, yeah that’s her name, summons Pumpkinhead it becomes linked to Ed Harley. Blood pacts work like that, I suppose. I naively thought that Ed Harley having to watch as these teenagers get brutally murdered because of his own vengeful stupidity, having to live with it forever that he could do that, was going to be his punishment. Then I saw the face, and it hit me. This was going to be Ed Harley’s last hurrah.

Hollywood likes things that are black and white. The main character is evil so he can cause death, destruction, and mayhem without batting an eye. Ed Harley’s a good man though. He’s a good dad. He’s a good person who’s so grief stricken he makes a disastrous decision.  Maybe that’s a reason why this movie didn’t get that much love. Pumpkinhead is colored in shades of gray, and it warns us about how people can be if pushed just a little too far. No one is inherently evil, but it’s possible for even good people to do terrible things. Give Pumpkinhead a watch if you haven’t, it holds up pretty well.

Please follow and like us:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *