PUMPKINHEAD is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. It is in my top ten, without question. It is my favorite monster movie, it boasts my favorite Lance Henriksen performance. There’s a reason you’ll find it over in the Hall of Fame while we talk about the sequel over here. I’ve loved PUMPKINHEAD since I first saw it, catching bits on the Sci-Fi Channel and then renting it when the woman who owned the local video store had gotten to know me so well that she let me go behind the register to rent the movies that had stopped doing business. That’s where I found PUMPKINHEAD. Meanwhile, I rented PUMPKINHEAD II from the same convenience store where I first rented JACK-O, LEPRECHAUN and PUPPET MASTER 5.
I’ll be honest, though. As a kid, PUMPKINHEAD II was my preferred PUMPKINHEAD, and I think that had everything to do with the fact that the Pumpkinhead carnage starts much earlier in the sequel, and there’s much more of it. That kind of thing really strikes at the heart of an eleven-year-old. I don’t feel the same as an adult. This is not the original, but that being said, this movie was directed by the late, great Jeff Burr and every single Jeff Burr film is a comfort movie for me. That’s an incredibly true statement and one I was lucky enough to tell him while he was still here.
The story revolves around a local sheriff and his teenage daughter, who quickly falls in with the wrong crowd. Before you know it, these backwoods rebels hit an old witch with their car and steal her spell book, so the witch conjures up Pumpkinhead to take revenge. This time, the demon contains the soul of a deformed boy named Tommy, who was the victim of a violent lynching in the ‘50s. That’s a neat twist on the formula. Whereas the original laid out that Pumpkinhead is summoned to enact vengeance on behalf of a wronged party, this new Pumpkinhead *is* the wronged party, and is also taking vengeance for himself. Kind of like a redneck rubber creature feature version of THE CROW.
The mechanics of how that’s even possible are wild, because the movie absolutely glosses over the fact that the original Pumpkinhead demon had sex with a human woman and that the deformed boy wasn’t actually deformed, he was half-demon. That’s covered in one line and simply never brought up again, which is wild stuff.
Andrew Robinson, Ami Dolenz and J. Trevor Edmond are all great as always, but the characterization is pretty thin, especially when compared to Lance Henriksen’s powerhouse performance in the original. This one’s much more of a traditional midnight monster movie, but a fun one nonetheless. There are some solid kills. In fact, PUMPKINHEAD II gets the award for having the single grossest decapitation I’ve ever seen in a movie. A character’s head is slowly torn upwards off his body and thrown to the ground, little bits of viscera and tendons slapping around like limp spaghetti.
To spoil the ending if you weren’t expecting the monster to be defeated in a pretty standard monster-run-amok tale, there’s actually something kind of tragic about the way it goes down. Tommy finally gets revenge, after decades, on the men who killed him, all of whom got to live decades longer, facing no consequences for their actions. Flourishing, even. Tommy gets no reward, he doesn’t get to disappear in peace and cross over to the other side. Instead, he is subjected to the exact same death, in the exact same place, by a different gang of idiots. He’s forced to do it all over again.
So, while PUMPKINHEAD II is overall pretty far from the devastating emotional resonance of the first, it definitely has its moments.