Return To Sleepaway Camp (2008)

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Director: Robert Hiltzik

Starring: Paul DeAngelo, Vincent Pastore, Isaac Hayes, Michael Gibney

RANDY: “Are you really that stupid?”

ALAN: “Not as stupid as you, you big penis!”

Although the cult classic horror Sleepaway Camp has had a couple of sequels, neither were really seen as true spiritual successors since none of the original cast and crew were involved. With the first film’s director, writer and key cast members making a comeback for Return To Sleepaway Camp though, it could probably be considered the first ‘canon’ sequel to the original movie.

(Heads up – there are some spoilers for the original Sleepaway Camp below)

Isaac Hayes quit as Chef in South Park, then played a chef in this instead. D’oh

Taking place 25 years after Sleepaway Camp, Return is set in Camp Manabe, a new summer camp part-run by Ronnie, the head counselor in the original film’s Camp Arawak. Ronnie (played once again by Paul DeAngelo, who seemingly hasn’t learned any new acting tricks in the past two and a half decades) gets suspicious when kids at the camp start dying in gruesome ways, just like they did back at Camp Arawak.

Ronnie’s certain that Angela is to blame for the killings, even though her cousin Ricky (who is also played by the original actor, now in his mid-30s and more camp than Butlins) assures them that she’s still locked up in an asylum and has been since her rather awkward public display of nudity.

This police guy looks and sounds a bit weird. Wonder why…

This makes the prime suspect Alan – a big fat simple lad who’s constantly bullied by the other campers. Throughout the film this gets to Alan and he snaps on a regular basis, often screaming at his bullies and sometimes even pointing a knife at them. But is Alan upset enough to actually kill anyone? That’d be telling.

Much like the original, everything in Return To Sleepaway Camp is pleasantly bad. The acting remains as abysmal as ever, the dramatic music blares over scenes of standard dialogue for no reason at all, the script is atrocious (check the example above to see what I mean) and while the inevitable “twist” ending was clearly never going to match the original in terms of shock value, it should still please some fans of the first film.

This was the worst telescope Duncan had ever used

A slasher film generally lives and dies by the inventiveness of its death scenes, and Return To Sleepaway Camp makes a decent attempt at it. Whether it’s the wince-inducing scene involving a length of wire tied to both the manhood of a poor chap tied to a tree and a truck set to drive off, or the will-they-won’t-they moment where two kids keep looking through a hole in the ground where they can see a sharpened a broom handle lying under their cabin, the kill scenes are fun enough to keep you watching even if they’re not amazingly well-executed (pun very much intended).

Return To Sleepaway Camp isn’t trying to be the greatest film ever made, it’s a fun and sometimes tongue-in-cheek love letter to fans of the first film who continue to keep its legend alive. For this reason I’d recommend watching the original first, and only giving this a shot if you decide you want more of the same.

The Gingerdead Man (2005)

Published on by Chris Scullion7 Comments

Director: Charles Band

Starring: Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke

“Daddy, you’ve got to come and get me. I’m at Betty’s Bakery and we’ve got homicidal baked goods after us.” (Lorna, The Gingerdead Man)

Sometimes a film title is so great you just know in your heart that the film has to be fantastic. Often though, especially in the B-movie horror genre, the movie fails to deliver on the quality of the title. The Gingerdead Man is unfortunately a prime example of this.

The film starts off with a flashback of a killer (played by Gary Busey) shooting up a restaurant then shooting a girl called Sarah as he leaves. Sarah survives, unlike the rest of her family, and is working in her bakery later when she hears that the killer is getting the electric chair.

Susan Boyle's makeover could have gone better

As luck would have it, the killer is executed just as she’s cooking a gingerbread man. After getting into a scrap with a local beauty queen, Sarah accidentally sends a power surge into the oven, causing the killer’s soul to travel through the electricity and into the gingerbread man she’s cooking. Cue ridiculous scenes with a tiny pastry swearing at people and threatening to cut their fingers off.

Despite the admittedly ace title The Gingerdead Man is an atrocious film, with acting that verges on the level of a primary school play and special effects that look like someone spent half an hour learning how to use a Mac for the first time.

What’s more, the Gingerdead Man himself is a rubbish character. His face is boring, his dialogue is horrible (“well, I sure ain’t the Pillsbury fucking Doughboy”) and most of the time you can tell he’s just a rubbish hand puppet that someone’s working from the inside. When he fires a gun in one scene you can even make out the hand holding the gun in place at one point.

Mary had been complaining of a sharp pain in her head for a while

The characters are vapid, their mock southern accents are horrible, one guy is an absolute cock yet manages to get the wholesome girl without really doing anything, and the ‘twist’ ending is so laughably bad that I had to rewind it to make sure it was definitely meant to be a twist.

The only positive thing about The Gingerdead Man is that at just under 70 minutes long it’s mercifully short, leaving you more time afterwards to watch genuinely entertaining films. This one should have been left in the oven to burn yet, amazingly, it has two sequels (The Passion Of The Crust and Saturday Night Cleaver), which both also seem to have had more work spent on the title than the film.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Published on by Chris Scullion7 Comments

Director: Robert Hiltzik

Starring: Felissa Rose, Jonathan Tiersten, Karen Fields

Also known as: Nightmare Vacation (UK VHS)

BILL: “Eat shit and die, Ricky!”
RICKY: “Eat shit and live, Bill.”

My first encounter with Sleepaway Camp was an unassuming purchase at a second-hand DVD shop in a Glasgow market. I was a member of a horror forum at the time and I vaguely remembered it being a part of someone’s list of horror films that were worth checking out. I had slight recollections that there was a reason it was such essential viewing but for the life of me I couldn’t remember why.

This (wo)man is guilty of the worst acting ever committed to celluloid

I took it home and there it sat for a few weeks, until eventually I watched it with my brother late one night. We were used to watching cheesy ’80s camp slashers and for the first 80 minutes of its 84-minute duration Sleepaway Camp is a prime example of this, with its hilariously bad acting and inventive, gruesome deaths. And then the ending came, with an image that will forever be burnt into the minds of my brother and I for the rest of our lives.

Angela and her cousin Ricky… but who’s the killer?

The general plot seems fairly run-of-the-mill. After a man and one of his children die in a horrible boat accident, the man’s sister takes in the other, orphaned child and raises it as one of her own. Fast-forward to ten years later and the child, Angela, heads off to summer camp with her cousin Ricky. As you’d expect, shit starts to go down at the camp and people start dropping off in gruesome ways, but who’s behind the killings?

The new series of Bullseye had started horribly wrong

Sleepaway Camp feels like a real labour of love. Despite the sub-standard acting which ranges from wooden (most of the counsellors are as one-dimensional as an x-axis) to ridiculously over-the-top (the actress – at least, I think it’s a woman – playing Angela’s aunt really has to be seen to be believed), it’s clear that everyone’s having a ball making this film and this comes across in the relationships with the children. Sure, they can’t act, but you find yourself not really caring.

Without even taking the ending into account (I’ll get to that later… no spoilers though, of course), Sleepaway Camp is littered with scenes that are surprisingly dark and grisly for a standard slasher film, especially considering most of the victims aren’t the older teen camp counsellors we’re used to in this sort of film, but actually the children attending the camp.

You’ll squirm as one of the girls gets hair curlers thrust into an unmentionable area, wince as a young lad is stung to death by bees, cheer as the paedophile chef (yes, really) gets what’s coming to him and gasp as you see a brief glimpse of a group of mutilated eight-year-olds. Yes, it might be cheesy and low-budget, but Sleepaway Camp isn’t fucking around.

Genuine dialogue: “She’s a real carpenter’s dream… flat as a board and needs a screw”

And then there’s the ending (which I refuse to even hint at). It’s a true shock becomes it comes completely out of nowhere, yet still makes sense in the context of the story. The film lulls you into a false sense of superiority as you’re more or less certain to guess the killer within the film’s first 25 minutes. It’s so obvious it’s almost laughable, and you sit patiently waiting for the ‘shock’ reveal when they’re exposed as the perpetrator. But then it throws a curveball at the last minute by revealing that the killer’s identity was never supposed to be the big twist, it was always meant to be something entirely different and far more shocking.

I urge you to track down Sleepaway Camp. It’s 80 minutes of fun, cheesy camp slasher gold, topped off with what’s genuinely one of the most memorable endings in cinematic history. You will not get that final image out of your head, I guarantee it.

Troll 2 (1990)

Published on by Chris Scullion8 Comments

Director: Claudio Fragasso

Starring: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Robert Ormsby

“Do you see this writing? Do you know what it means? Hospitality! And you can’t piss on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” (Michael, Troll 2)

A lot of films are considered awful, but Troll 2 is so bad that calling it awful feels like going easy on it. Not content with simply being a bad film, Troll 2 was actually at one point the #1 worst-rated film on the entire Internet Movie Database site.

That’s one hell of an achievement, and one that most people who’ve seen the film wouldn’t argue with, but that dubious honour only tells half the story. It doesn’t explain, for example, that despite (or indeed because of) its flaws it’s one of the most entertaining films you’ll see.

This Jimmy Saville goblin is easily my favourite of the bunch

The plot is up there with Citizen Kane. Young Joshua and his family head to the tiny country town of Nilbog to do a house swap with a family there. All is not as it seems though, as Joshua’s dead grandfather appears in a vision to tell him that the town is actually inhabited by goblins pretending to be humans. What’s more, these goblins want to turn Joshua and his family (as well as a group of teenage lads who’ve also driven to Nilbog) into plants so they can eat them. Because they’re vegetarian goblins, you see.

The slowest rescue scene ever committed to film

The truly impressive thing about Troll 2 is the consistency with which it delivers comically bad moments. From the opening scene in which Joshua’s grandpa tells him the story of the goblins, to the moment where Joshua literally pisses  on a dinner table to stop his parents from eating tainted goblin food (leading to the classic line at the top of this review), to the sister’s amazingly bad dance routine, to the hilarious goblin costumes, to the blatantly obvious ‘revelation’ when Joshua looks in a car mirror and realises why the town’s called Nilbog, every single scene features at least one thing that’s laughably awful.

To give Troll 2 a little credit (and only a little, mind) there are some moments that are clearly supposed to be ridiculous. The part where a young lad in a camper van is seduced by a woman wielding an ear of sweetcorn, in which their passionate encounter ends up getting so steamy that the entire van somehow fills up with popcorn, couldn’t possibly have meant to be serious.

Not a good actor among this bunch, yet they're all lovable in their own way

Indeed, the more you watch Troll 2 and the more hilariously bad moments you encounter, the more suspicious you get and you start to fear you’ve been the victim of an elaborate practical joke, that the movie that was designed to be deliberately bad and you’ve fallen for it. Thankfully, as proven by the recent (fantastic) documentary Best Worst Movie, it’s clear this wasn’t the case and the cast and crew were actually trying their hardest.

Troll 2 is the perfect film to watch with a group of friends. While most cheesy films suffer from bad acting or a daft plot, Troll 2 is rare in that every single element – the direction, music, acting, special effects, script, plot and editing – is fantastically terrible. It’s the movie equivalent of all the planets lining up as they revolve around the sun – it’s so rare that every single element that could be shit is present and accounted for. As a result, it’s a joy to watch from start to finish.

(technical ability)

(pure joy)

Killjoy (2000)

Published on by Chris Scullion7 Comments

Director: Craig Ross Jr

Starring: Angel Vargas, Vera Yell, Lee Marks

“That’s how you bust caps, mother FUCKER!” (Killjoy, Killjoy)

Killjoy is a film about a bullied boy who summons the spirit of an evil voodoo ghetto clown from the ‘hood. If you managed to read that without flinching then you must have truly seen everything the world has to offer.

The story goes that young Michael fancies the girlfriend of Lorenzo, the baddest motherfucker in the whole… um, street. Lorenzo threatens Michael with a gun and tells him that if he ever goes near his lady again he’ll put more holes in him than this movie’s plot.

Easily in the top five things you don't want to look up and see during sex

Eager to get his own back on Lorenzo and the girl (even though she didn’t really do anything), Michael decides to summon Killoy, an evil spirit that messes people up in a way that’s never really explained too well. After sitting a hilariously cheap-looking doll in a room full of candles and asking Killjoy to come, Michael’s prayers are answered and Killjoy starts fucking people up.

Doug enjoyed Turkish Delight a bit too much

This is where the movie starts to make even less sense than it already did. It’s hard to tell whether everyone’s in some sort of dream world, or the real world, or a different dimension or something, and the film can’t really make its own mind up either. One minute the characters are entering an ice cream truck and teleporting into a different room, the next their corpses are turning up in real life. Confusion runs rife.

"My hair? Oh, I was giving my radio a bath"

Also bizarre is Killjoy himself. He’s essentially some sort of ‘gangsta’  clown and as such has some ridiculous lines that make him about as terrifying as a Kriss Kross music video. Watch as he slaps a man to the ground then says “biiiiiii-iiitch”, or attacks a female character before saying “that’s some good pussy”. There’s nothing terrifying about him at all, he’s just a proper pain in the arse.

I can’t really recommend Killjoy, not even as a “so bad it’s good” film, unless you see genuine humour in the idea of a killer clown talking like Chris Rock. It’s so low budget that it goes beyond “how charming” and wanders into “they’re not even fucking trying to make it look good” territory, and as such is more annoying than amusing to watch. Check out the trailer below and you’ll more or less get the full joke.

Night Of The Bloody Apes (1969) (Video Nasty review #4)

Published on by Chris Scullion4 Comments

Director: René Cardona

Starring: José Elisa Moreno, Carlos Lopez Moctezuma, Norma Lazareno

“I’ll say that’s absurd, the proofs are circumstantial, it’s more probable that of late more and more you’ve been watching on your television many of those pictures of terror.” (Dr Martinez, Night Of The Bloody Apes)

Night Of The Bloody Apes is easily in my top ten Mexican-luchador-wrestling-ape-based monster movies, and I can assure you that’s a highly competitive list. Given its title though, it’s actually a little disappointing since there’s only one ape in the film and it’s not really a proper one. Let me explain.

The movie has two main plotlines. Lucy, a masked wrestler, is having problems living with herself after she puts another wrestler in hospital by throwing her out of the ring during a match. Meanwhile, in the same hospital, the mad scientist Dr Krellman is upset that his son is dying of lukemia and so decides that the only way to save his life is by giving him a heart transplant.

"I hope everyone likes my new church outfit"

Maybe hearts aren’t too easy to come by in Mexico – I’m no Top Gear presenter so I’m not really touching that one – but for some reason Dr Krellman decides that, rather than waiting for a human heart to become available, he’ll kill a gorilla and take its heart instead. Because that’ll definitely work and won’t fuck things up.

After the transplant, it quickly becomes clear that it definitely hasn’t worked and things are very much fucked up when Krellman’s son becomes a sort of half-man half-gorilla. His face turns into that of a strange monkey man and he has the sort of rage that can only be matched by watching someone watching two hours’ worth of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

"I only came here for bunion surgery"

Monkey chap then escapes the hospital and goes on the warpath, raping and mutilating various ladyfolk living nearby. It’s up to Dr Krellman to find out how to stop him… possibly by replacing his monkey heart with another human one. If only there was some sort of hospitalised female wrestler close to death with a heart that could be sneakily removed and used instead…

Wayne Rooney relaxes at home

Night Of The Bloody Apes is just silly from start to finish and while it’s understandable why it was considered a video nasty at the time it’s still very tame compared to some of the others. The ‘rape’ scenes are thankfully clothed and very brief and the blood is a bit unrealistic. In fact, perhaps the most controversial moments in the film are the two heart transplant scenes, which actually use stock footage of real-life human heart transplants for added realism. If you’re a bit squeamish when watching operation footage then, this isn’t for you.

By far the best thing about the film is the terrible dialogue. Since it was originally filmed in Mexico it’s all dubbed, but the translation to English is so literal that many of the lines make no real sense (like the example at the top of this review). This results in some quotable classics, like the scene where Dr Krellman tries to convince his accomplice to take the injured wrestler’s heart: “A little slither of bone lies in her cerebrum. And if by some miracle she lives she’ll be an idiot for the rest of her life.”

If a big group of you want to have a laugh while watching something pleasantly crap, Night Of The Bloody Apes is a good shout. Watch it on your own though and the novelty will wear off about half an hour in. Naturally, the trailer makes it look a lot more exciting than it really is:

Axe (1977) (Video Nasty review #3)

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Director: Frederick R Friedel

Starring: Leslie Lee, Jack Canon, Ray Green, Frederick R Friedel

(a tortured man jumps out a window to his death)
LOMAX: “Why’d he do that? That was twelve floors.”
STEELE: “Nah, it was only nine.”

There’s nothing like the power of advertising. Axe was originally called Lisa, Lisa and was meant to be an artsy fartsy look at the way people under attack can do disturbing things to protect themselves and their family. It didn’t do too well so it was rebranded Axe and started doing the drive-in circuit in America under the guise of a horror film. In some parts it was even renamed again, this time to California Axe Massacre, despite the fact there’s no massacre in it and it’s set nowhere near California.

Derek wasn't a fan of Radox's new strawberry-scented bath gel

The story is similar to many of the ‘revenge’ movies at the time. A gang of three ne’er-do-wells is on the run from the police so after killing a chap by beating him to death with a doll (seriously) and cutting his nose off, then traumatising a supermarket woman by shooting a bottle of ketchup above her head, they seek solace in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

The problem is, the farmhouse is the home of teenage Lisa and her fully paralysed granddad. Well, I say fully paralysed, but he’s got a different facial expression in every scene and can sometimes be seen moving his eyes or shaking, meaning instead he just looks like a man sitting there not doing anything.

Anyway, the three decide to take over the house and torment Lisa and her granddad. She’s not having it though, and after one of them tries a bit of illicit fiddling she kills him and cuts him into pieces with an axe. I’d have gone for the pepper spray myself, but I’ve never been in that situation so what do I know.

Cheer up missus, you'll get to star in a good film one day. Actually, you won't

The rest of the movie entails Lisa trying to make sure the other two gang members aren’t suspicious while also protecting her granddad from any harm. Yet despite being a brisk 68 minutes long, Axe somehow still has the ability to feel sluggish and boring at times. The acting is beyond woeful – I really hope the ‘actress’ playing Lisa was trying to make her sound a bit mental and that wasn’t her actual acting style – and that goes for everyone including the director, Frederick F Friedel, who stars as Billy, the member of the gang who has a conscience and starts to feel sorry for Lisa. Meanwhile, this poor acting is underlined with is a bizarre soundtrack consisting mainly of bongo drums and saxophones.

It’s clear that had Axe kept its original title of Lisa, Lisa it probably would have escaped the DPP’s Video Nasties list and would never been banned in the UK. Everything that could be controversial is actually pretty tame: there are only three killings and they mostly take place off-screen, the attempted sexual assault scene is a fully clothed affair and doesn’t rely on exploitative nudity to titillate audiences, and as a result it’s dwarved by most of today’s horror films (and many of those released at the same time as it) when it comes to notorious material.

Axe isn’t a completely terrible film: the first fifteen minutes are interesting and the supermarket scene is genuinely emotional. It’s certainly not enough to recommend a film on one scene though, and as a result I’d only recommend watching it if, like me, you’re trying to see as many Video Nasties as possible. In fact, the trailer’s much more fun to watch than the film, so be sure to watch it below.

HOW NASTY IS IT? – Not really nasty at all. There’s one scene involving a flick knife, and all the rest of the kills happen off-screen. There’s a fair amount of (unrealistic) blood but it’s rarely seen coming out of anyone, it’s generally just seen as stains on the floor or on the killers’ clothing. It’s no worse than the likes of Halloween and really should never have been banned in the first place, which is why these days it’s once again readily available to buy uncut.

Attack Of The Super Monsters (1982)

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Director: Tom Weiner

Starring (voices): Tom Weiner, Cam Clark, Robin Beth Levenson, Joe Perry

“This is a real emergency: the super monsters have sent a triceratops to the outer suburbs of the city.” (Dr Carmody, Attack Of The Super Monsters)

This film is fucking nuts, so let me try to take you through the plot. It turns out that the dinosaurs didn’t actually die out millions of years ago: instead they’ve been living underground. In that time they’ve managed to learn how to speak English by reading humans’ minds and have appointed a leader, the evil Emperor Tyrannus (a T-Rex).

Tyrannus summons Eddy the allosaurus and tells him to go up to Earth to start up some shit. Eddy shoots some beams out of his eyes at some dogs, causing them to turn into evil red dogs and maul their owners. Oh, by the way, the dinosaurs are guys in suits (Godzilla-style) but the dogs and humans are anime cartoons. Think Roger Rabbit.

The Gemini Squad – a right bunch of knobs

Things get even weirder when we’re introduced to the Gemini Squad. They consist of Jim and Gem (who are brother and sister), Gerry (a fat guy) and Wally (a science officer with a weird face). Oh, and a doctor guy called Carmody who somehow knows everything that’s going on and has an explanation for it all.

Anyway, it’s clear while watching Attack Of The Super Monsters that it’s actually four episodes of some Japanese TV show haphazardly edited together to make a movie. Four different dinosaurs are summoned throughout the film and they’re all defeated in the same way: Jim and Gem merge their energy to form Gemini, a non-binary mash-up of the two who can somehow pilot a spaceship a bit better or something, then proceed to kill the dinosaur (which then blows up for no reason).

“Oh, hello there”

It’s a bizarre mix of live-action “man in suit” shenanigans, anime-style cartoons and crap model vehicle shots reminiscent of an even lower-budget version of Thunderbirds. Yet despite how rubbish it all looks it’s got a charm that makes it fun to watch throughout. The script is so awful it’s hilarious, the dinosaurs have amazingly hammy voices and it’s all just a good bit of fun.

In all, it’s worth a watch, if only so you can say you’ve seen a pterodactyl command some bats into turning some men into skeletons before said pterodactyl slams into a skyscraper over and over again. And who doesn’t wish they could say that?

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Silent Hill (2006)

Published on by Chris Scullion2 Comments

Director: Christophe Gans

Starring: Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden

“Mother is God in the eyes of a child.” (Cybil Bennett, Silent Hill)

Most movies based on video games are, to put it bluntly, a pile of shite. Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon, Dead Or Alive… all horrible. It’s probably for this reason that I’ve somehow managed to go five years without checking out the Silent Hill film, but having finally watched it yesterday I was reasonably happy.

Silent Hill‘s plot is loosely based on that of the first game in the series. The game started with a chap called Harry Mason going on holiday with his daughter. When a girl steps in front of the car, he swerves to avoid her and crashes. When he comes to, he realises his daughter is missing, leading him to explore the nearby town of Silent Hill to see if he can find her. Cue lots of fucked-up monsters.

Standards at the NHS were clearly slipping

The movie, meanwhile, replaces Harry with a female character, Rose. Her adopted daughter has been sleepwalking and talking about a place called Silent Hill, so Rose takes her to Silent Hill to see if it triggers any memories about her past. Then, as in the game, they crash on the outskirts of the town and the daughter goes missing. It’s a small difference but an important one, as it makes it harder to sympathise with Rose when you know she deliberately chose to go to Silent Hill rather than ending up there by accident.

"Don't ever take me to that fucking hairdresser again, mum"

Silent Hill is a beautiful movie. Obviously when I say that I’m not referring to the horrible, mutated monsters that sometimes look like wriggling human-sized acid-apitting condoms, I mean the way it’s shot. The town of Silent Hill almost feels like a character itself, such is the detail with which everything’s been designed. The moody, empty streets look like they haven’t been updated since the 1950s and the constant fall of ash from the skies gives everything a surreal, otherworldly feeling.

Combine this with Akira Yamaoka’s stunning music (the vast majority of the movie’s score consists of music from the games) and you’ve got a movie that’s a treat for the eyes and ears when there aren’t freaky monster things shuffling about.

For a film based on such a grim series of games there are only a couple of visually shocking moments in the film, the most notable being someone having their skin ripped off and flung against the wall of a church. A normal occurrence on a Thursday night in Liverpool, sure, but something rarely seen in the world of cinema.

"That must have been one hell of a Nando's"

Silent Hill is enjoyable until the final 30 minutes, when everything starts to go a bit mental (well, moreso than usual). The plot starts getting needlessly complex and confusing, and it all gets a bit silly. This of course is nothing new for those familiar with the Silent Hill games, but at least there the plot took a back seat to the whole ‘shooting things and trying not to die’ challenge the player faced. Since most movies are very much plot-focused, there’s nothing for the convoluted story to hide behind.

As a video game movie, Silent Hill is one of the better ones out there. It perfectly captures the tone of the games, right down to the silly plot. As a movie judged on its own merits though, it’s a gorgeous film that unfortunately runs out of steam when its story becomes as messy as the habits of its monsters.

Pumpkinhead (1988)

Published on by Chris Scullion13 Comments

Director: Stan Winston

Starring: Lance Henriksen, Jeff East, Matthew Hurley

MAGGIE: “Don’t worry, God will help us.” (loads shotgun)
TRACY: “Then what’s that for?”
MAGGIE: “In case God doesn’t show up.”

Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen) is a bit of a hillbilly. He lives in a house with his young son, who makes him a necklace thing for seemingly no reason. The next day a few bikers come to the village and run his son over, killing him. Lance is clearly pissed off (and rightfully so), so he seeks out a crazy old woman who teaches him how to make a demon based on his rage that will seek vengeance. And so Pumpkinhead is born. Cue mindless killing of the bikers.

I had always wanted to see Pumpkinhead ever since they made an action figure of him in my favourite action figure series, Movie Maniacs. After all, it had to be memorable if someone took the time to make an action figure of it. As it turns out, Pumpkinhead is at best an average film which lacks a set of balls.

Pumpkinhead is a huge monster (even the action figure dwarves the other ones in the series), but all it seems to do to the people it kills is put its hand over their head and pick them up a bit. That’s extremely fucking weak. The plot’s also a bit simple. Boy dies, man goes mad, enlists the help of a demon which then kills people. Meh.

The fact that it’s from the ’80s is no excuse. Pet Sematary still scares me to this day. But this was just poor. There are two ‘jump’ scares in the film. One just isn’t scary (Henriksen’s dead son sits up in the car next to him) and the other’s poorly timed (a dog wanders slowly into the frame to a dramatic musical sting). And as impressive as Pumpkinhead looks, it doesn’t seem that it could do any harm at any point, especially given that its main party trick is the old “picking people up by the head” routine. Give me a pointy stick and I could probably take the bastard.

Yes, there are a couple of deaths, but they all happen off-screen so we don’t really know what happens. The only one that’s sort of shown is when Pumpkinhead uses the tried and tested “pick up by the head”, climbs a tree then drops the person he’s carrying. Naturally however, we don’t see the impact. To be fair, there’s one clever moment where an unfortunate chap is impaled on a rifle, but that’s about it.

Incidentally, the story for Pumpkinhead was based on a poem by Ed Justin. Here’s how it goes:

Keep away from Pumpkinhead,
Unless you tire of living
His enemies are mostly dead,
He’s mean and unforgiving
Bolted doors and windows barred,
Guard dogs prowling in the yard,
Won’t protect you in your bed,
Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead

Oddly, it doesn’t mention anything about Lance Henriksen’s son getting his head caved in.

Sorry to say, Pumpkinhead isn’t too great. If you’re a special effects junkie it’s certainly worth a watch to see the great Pumpkinhead puppetry (with Stan Winston directing it’s no surprise the monster looks great), but I wouldn’t make it top of the priority list if I were you.