1988
4 kills that we don't even see
First Kill - 40+ minutes
McFarlane Toys makes a Pumpkinhead toy doll, so I figured he'd be a good killer like G.I. Joe or My Little Pony. Unfortunately, Pumpkinhead, a creature that looks very much like the alien in Alien and nothing like a real pumpkin, is a pretty sad killer. We never really see anything interesting -- just a big hand come from somewhere and pull someone away to die.
Unfortunately, this movie is so much more plot than kills. We meet an old man and son who run a dirt town grocery store. Some punk kids stop by with their dirtbikes and meet the old man, the boy, and his lovable dog Flipper. Old man leaves his son unattended while he goes out on an errand. Son chases dog out of shop when dog hears punk kids riding dirt bikes. Bikes hit ramp-like hill and narrowily avoid hitting the kid but manage to knock him down anyway. Lovable dog looks at the boy and comtemplates humping him while the punk kids panic and race away. One punk kid does stay behind to look after the boy and tell the old man how his poor parenting got his only boy killed, which is the smart thing to do cause now the old man knows who must pay. Well, old man weeps like a woman, picks up his dead little Joey, and brings him to the local witch. (There's a tribe of rednecks he consults who seem to know everything necessary to move the story along.) Well, the witch says she can't bring his son back to life, so that only leaves one option available -- revenge!
The exclamation point lies -- the revenge isn't anything worth getting excited over. Old man summons Pumpkinhead who then goes out to kill all those punk kids who done wronged his boy even though it really isn't their fault. Of course, the guy who knocked the kid down was busy getting his drink on so he would have been arrested just the same, a fact he knows and goes crazy over since he's on parole (he's a bad punk kid, and the black leather he wears in the desert heat reminds us of this fact). We get to see a lot of inter-punk kid turmoil as they wrestle with what to do, all the while the bad punk goes kinda crazy about the situation and fighting his friends and locking them up so they don't call the ambulance and thereby tipping off the police.
I wasted a whole day of my 30-day Blockbuster pass renting this dud. Oh, Pumpkinhead does start to get some kills in, but by then you don't care and only get angry once you notice how the few kills are never shown. We might see a body swing down or something, but nothing worthwhile. When you only have half a dozen kill candidates, you need to make sure that every kill counts, something Pumpkinhead needs to learn. The movie god made R-rated movies for two things -- sex and gore. We get none of that in Pumpkinhead. The pope should excommunicate everyone involved with the making of this movie.
Obviously, good guys have to win in a movie, but how do punk kids stop Pumpkinhead? Well, they can't. Instead, redneck Huck Finn comes in the end to tell the surviving two punk kids (nicer ones who wanted to help the boy) a bit about Pumpkinhead and helps them survive until the old man who summoned him commits suicide, which in turn kills Pumpkinhead. There isn't a font large enough to indicate how LAME this movie is.
The movie's dialogue is boring, the acting is too decent to be entertaining, the plot isn't interesting, and it's just too much drama to make for a good stupid scary movie at all. I give it half a skull cause we do get a kid kill technically though it's utter crap, and the old man has some neat looking possessed moments when summoning Pumpkinhead.
-- Dad's Sticky Axe
