No Show

FILM:

Creepshow - 1982
Written by Stephen King
Directed by George Romero

If you've read my last couple entries, you may have noticed me, hm, not so much taking digs as not entirely won over by corny horror and "womp womp" tromboner twist endings inspired by old EC comics.  Now, I have nothing against EC horror comics or any other EC comics.  I love that stuff, but I love it in context.  Stephen King and George Romero loved it when they were kids, and then in the 80s decided that they wanted the rest of us to love it too, and so they made Creepshow.  It's now been longer since Creepshow than Creepshow was from Vault of Horror, and the idea is showing signs of decay.

Creepshow consists of five stories framed in scenes of a (frankly abusive) father taking his son's comic book and throwing it away.  Resting atop the trash heap, the wind stirs its pages and the stories unfold.  So faithful to the source material that they hired former EC comics artist Jack Kamen for these segments.

On the one hand, it may be unfair of me to judge Creepshow for succeeding in its anachronistic ambitions.  On the other hand, there are still legitimate complaints about the overall quality of the work, so I'll start with those and work my way back to petty.  The biggest single flaw that I can't blame on the tributary nature of the film is that the stories simply aren't very good.  Oh, sure, they're slavishly faithful to the source material, but they're poorly paced, due in large part to their predictability, and there were moments between them that seemed too similar.  Yes, I'm actually complaining that an anthology lacked variety and that the segments were too long.

Father's Day is about a nasty family of rich folks waiting while their aunt mourns the family patriarch whom she killed, then he rises from the dead and kills the lot of them.  Actually that's not what it's about; that's the whole story, stretched out to 20 minutes.  For all the time we spend trapped with these tedious characters, they never really become characters.  They're mannequins in a diorama of death and we're stuck waiting for zombie grandpa to shuffle his ass along and knock them over.

Then we get perhaps the most telling segment, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.  This one stars Stephen King himself as a bumbling yokel that would get even the producers of Hee Haw to declare "Oh dear, don't you think that's a bit... much?"  That suggests to me the magnitude of corn that King had in mind for the project.  Jordy finds a meteor, and while he fantasizes about the potential reward or humiliation of telling someone about his find, he becomes overgrown with mutant space weeds.  It's obvious early on that he's going to become overgrown with space weeds, but again, the conclusion is dragged out for far too long.

Mercifully, after that, we get the least-bad acting in Creepshow from Ted Danson and Leslie Nielsen in Something to Tide You Over.  Danson is the scoundrel who had an affair with Nielsen's wife, and Nielsen is out for non-analogous revenge.  In an unnecessarily complicated set-up, Nielsen buries Danson and his wife up to their necks on the beach as the tide is coming in, letting them watch each other drown via video.  Then they come back as waterlogged zombies for revenge, The End.  This one tried to throw a curve into an A-to-B story, but the potential drama between the two men was never really explored and the video actually diminished the inherent drama in burying them face to face.  Then there was none of the guilt and creeping dread of something pursuing Nielsen.  They just showed up all corpsified and that was that.

The fourth segment actually went to the greatest lengths to almost have a story, but missed wildly.  In The Crate, Hal Holbrook is a modest college professor married to an unbearable and overbearing Adrienne Barbeau.  When an antique crate containing a still-living monster on campus, he plots to use the monster to do his killing for him.  There's not even a twist there.  The monster gets her and Holbrook seals it back up in the crate and throws it in the quarry lake.  Okay, the twist is that it breaks out, but that's not even a twist; that's just an ending.  Despite a little character building, the story is flawed and never really means anything.  Rather than dramatic tension and action-driven plot, there's just "Welp, that happened."

The last segment, They're Creeping Up On You was my favorite.  A mean and paranoid old millionaire (EG Marshall) is cooped up in his futuristic crazy-den like Howard Hughes in Vegas.  His all-white apartment is supposed to secured against all invaders, large and microscopically small.  And yet, he keeps finding (and killing) cockroaches as he goes about the business of hostile takeovers and the pleasure of shitting on the little guy.  More roaches.  No remorse.  More roaches.  Most roaches.  Evil millionaire problem solved.  Again, it's a woefully thin story that takes far too long getting to the point, but Marshall's energy, the now retro-futuristic apartment, the whiff of still-relevant satire and the real roaches nudge it to the head of the class.

Those, I feel, were the legitimate shortcomings of the film; where they just did not present quality material.  I feel obligated to overlook the bad, bad acting because I see it as an intentional effort to convey the sensation of the economic but tone deaf dialogue of the comics being honored here.  We're generally used to a more naturalistic acting style nowadays, and 1950s soap opera acting wears out quickly.  Oh, I'm sorry, maybe you' watch a lot of Big Bang Theory and you're used to one-dimensional characters and performances, so I can't speak for you.

Creepshow also suffers from many of the musical problems that many 80s films have; specifically that it's bad, loud and heavy on the synthesizers.  They really overlooked the "background" in "background music" in the 80s, didn't they?

Needless to say, Creepshow is never scary.

I will give it two pieces of praise, however.  One; it IS indeed the faithful tribute it intends to be, execution notwithstanding.  Crypt of Terror did indeed regularly present five stories much like these.  But it didn't take two hours to read an issue.  It barely took 20 minutes.  Breaking up the movie this way gave them too many minutes to tell too little story.  If King wasn't willing to update the material with things like character development, then he should have written more stories to fill out the film and gotten them to their points more quickly.

The other piece of praise is for Tom Savini, Romero's longtime make-up and special effects collaborator.  His zombie grandpa in Father's Day, water zombies in Something to Tide You Over and flesh-rending gore in The Crate & They're Creeping Up On You are top-notch practical effects.

If you had cable in the 80s, you probably have a nostalgic place in your heart for Creepshow, but I didn't and I don't.  There's only so much that can be chalked up to honoring pulp comics.  The rest is bad choices.

If you really want to reminisce about the pulp comics of the 50s, you'd be better served by reading them.

Siam Afraid... Siam VERY Afraid

FILM:

4bia - 2008
See link for Writing & Directing credits

4bia, or Phobia is a Thai anthology of (get this) FOUR short tales of terror, each from a different creative team. Two of the stories come from the directors (and one from a producer) who made the intensely creepy Shutter (2004) and Alone (2007) which was all I needed to bring me to 4bia.

There were three main things that I noticed in 4bia.  First, that 20 to 30 minutes is a really good length for horror.  Where yesterday's ABCs of Death 2 gave its directors a fairly restrictive four to six minutes, 20 to 30 minutes, obviously, gave creators a lot more room to move around and develop stories.  The next observation is that 20 to 30 minutes can also be an improvement over having too much time to fill.  Alone and (especially) Shutter struggled to maintain momentum through a full-length feature and dragged out moments and scenes that didn't necessarily enhance their tales.  Brevity demands focus, and the films that make up 4bia are well-served by the removal of any obligation to fill time.  The third thing is cultural.  The films in 4bia are earnest and never resort to Cryptkeeper-y winking at the viewer, even when they twist at the end.  The premise here is fear, and the directors by-and-large deliver.

The first story is Happiness which focuses on a lonely young woman, housebound thanks to a recent auto accident that left her in a huge leg cast.  The tedium of her solitude is broken up when she receives a text message from a mysterious stranger.  The text messages would have gotten unbearable in a full-length feature, but time constraints force the story to get to the point.

Tit for Tat is an aggressive tale of revenge upon high school bullies.  Again, giving it more time would not have done it any particular favors.  The shocking conclusion arrived right on time, mercifully cutting short its use of outdated-by-American-standards CGI.  In fact, it was the ending that really paid off the rest of the story.  I might have preferred for them to have better established one of the plot points related to it, but it's also possible that its impact just wasn't adequately represented by the subtitles.

In The Middle follows four teenage boys on a tragic camping trip in the jungle.  I really enjoyed their interplay.  They were probably the best developed characters in any segment.  The story wasn't as well developed, throwing in a twist that deserved better supporting hints.

One of the boys from In The Middle was the brother of a flight attendant, which explains why Pim is working a chartered flight for Princess Sophia by herself in Last Fright.  She and the other attendant had attended a chartered flight for the couple a year before, and now Pim is left alone with the disdainful princess, but why?  This was probably the scariest segment of the bunch, taking full advantage of the vagary between the supernatural and the psychological uncertainty of guilt and fear.

4bia is a remarkably solid horror anthology.  Sure, it's still uneven, but that's just another word for variety in this case.  It's a great introduction to Thai horror if you haven't yet discovered this thriving niche.  For my own part, I will be checking out Phobia 2 (what, no 5bia?) and other Bangywood fare.  The Land of Smiles definitely knows a thing or two about screams.

Do I Have to Spell It Out for You?

Over the next few days, I will take a look at a collection of collections.  Horror seems to be the most popular genre for the film anthology.  I think a lot of that is the result of the EC Comics influence that so drove the filmmakers of the 70s and 80s, who then in turn influenced future generations.  I'm not convinced that horror is really the best genre for brevity, greatly preferring the slow-burning dread myself.  There's also the not-insignificant matter of inconsistency.  Anthologies are, almost by definition, bound to be a mixed bag.  That being said, both the V/H/S series and the ABCs of Death series (both highly inconsistent themselves) have shown a few glimmers of hope that there might still be potential in the short form.

FILM:

B

C

The ABCs of Death 2 - 2014
see link for writing & directing credits

I wasn't particularly impressed by 2012's horror anthology The ABCs of Death.  The concept -- assign 26 directors a letter of the alphabet and give them free reign (and I mean FREE reign) to create a short film (using any word of their choosing beginning with that letter) on the theme of death (with the general understanding that the end product would be a horror movie, mind you) -- was intriguing, but the end product suffered from the flaws inherent to the concept.  There simply weren't enough good segments to tide one over through all the dumb ones.  That being said, it's still worth seeing if the concept interests you.  While the average gets dragged down by weak links, the few gold nuggets do indeed represent some unique and imaginative film making.

W

If The ABCs of Death 2 had been any other sequel, then I'd surely have been unlikely to watch it based on my experience with the first, but due to the concept (and some positive early reviews) it sounded like it deserved a second chance... or 26 second chances in this case.  The concept is the same, but the overall quality of the shorts is greatly improved.

The original suffered (and I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but) from too many high-concept shorts that weren't well fleshed out.  Sure, some of the "zany" ones were fun, but then they got kind of monotonous.  Ditto the "moody" ones and the "look how much fake blood I can get with our penny-ante budget!" ones.  The sequel has many more segments with better considered narratives.  There are still a lot of "Uh Oh! Now THAT was a twist!" endings reminiscent of 1950s horror comics, but I can see how that would be a difficult angle to avoid given the history of the horror genre in America.

D

It seems like there are fewer animated segments in ABCs 2, for good or ill.  I can only think of two.  H is for Head Games by Bill Plympton is (disappointingly) disappointing, playing like an outtake from the kissing cartoons he was doing 20 years ago.  The other one, D is for Deloused was one of the most disturbing and strange segments in the whole collection.  Other stand-outs (at least those that come to mind the next day, although I feel like there are a lot more that would elicit and "Oh yeaaahh" from me is mentioned) include the VERY messed-up Z is for Zygote, the tense and slightly shocking R is for Roulette, and U is for Utopia & C is for Capital Punishment which actually develop poignant themes.  Once again, the Japanese directors show up to defend their insanity crown, though few of these bolster the overall average of the collection.

Short stories made shorter; there are still a few clunkers in ABCs 2, but they're now squarely in the minority as this sequel anthology gathers some altogether stronger narrative pieces while still maintaining a great sense of variety.

R

Cowboys and Idioms

FILM:

Near Dark - 1987
Written by Kathryn Bigelow & Eric Red
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Despite the title, Near Dark's most dramatic moments come not at sunset, but at sunrise.  The creatures of the night might come out near dark, but they run for their lives near dawn.  The ordinary vampire movie would frame nightfall as a time to fear, but Near Dark isn't the ordinary vampire movie -- not that it ever utters "the 'v' word."

Caleb Colton is an earnest young farm boy used to relying on his sweet-faced good looks rather than thoughtful conversation to get over with girls.  When he meets the odd but beautiful Mae, he takes her strange behavior for foreplay and barely notices that his "aw shucks" sexual pressuring techniques barely distract her from stargazing.  It's only when the nearing dawn instills a panic within Mae that she concedes to his demand for a kiss in order to get to shelter.  The kiss turns into hungrier passions, and before long, Mae's instincts have caused her to sink her teeth into Caleb's neck.

The tale that follows really reminded me more of, say, The Devil's Rejects or Natural Born Killers than your typical vampire movie.  Rather than being structured around a hunter/prey rivalry between vampires and humans (or vice versa), Near Dark is more like a serial killer/cult abduction.  Before the sun has finished rising, Caleb is already meeting Mae's "family" and facing the prospect of proving himself "worthy" to a skeazy band of hillbilly blood-suckers.  A blazing road story of dark seduction and seemingly futile resistance follows.

Sure, there are plenty of vampire stories about a newly turned former-humans joining the world of the living dead, but seldom with vampires this trashy and pathological.  Caleb appears to be trapped in one kind of death or another, and it's going to take some creative problem solving to get him out of it.  Near Dark does spring a solution on us, but it's one that could have been a little better developed by the narrative.  At least it's different, and sets the finale up for a potential outcome that wouldn't necessarily occur to the viewer given traditional genre norms.

Near Dark is incredibly moody and stylish (small surprise with Kathryn Bigelow at the helm), creating a contained story that doesn't get caught up in its own mythology.  They're only as vampiric as they need to be to tell the tale of the farm boy led away from home and seduced by the acceptance of a new kind of "family."  Virtually the same story could be told with knives instead of teeth, or even just with the deep cuts of addiction.  This way, at least, is a lot more action packed.

Near Dark got overshadowed by Lost Boys (and under-marketed by its failing studio) in 1987, so it may have slipped past a lot of moviegoers' radars, but it's definitely worth swinging back around to pick it up.  It's not quite as stylish as Lost Boys but it more than makes up for that with a stronger story, generally better acting and a more unflinching look at its night creatures.  There are still good vampire movies to discover.

Sleeping Sickness

FILM:

Coma - 1978
Written & Directed by Michael Crichton
from the Book by Robin Cook

Coma is more often classified as a thriller, but I would propose that it's just as much a horror movie as any slasher.  The implied body count in Coma is higher than its contemporary, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and just because the killers wear tailored suits doesn't make them any less remorseless sociopaths.  If anything, it should make Coma more terrifying.  After all, people who dispassionately kill for profit are a more present threat to our real lives than random axe murderers.

Michael Douglas tends to be the big name on the marquee for Coma, but he's really little more than a supporting character.  The film rests predominantly on the shoulders of Genevieve Bujold.  Bujold and Douglas are young doctors and lovers, Susan and Mark.  When Susan's friend comes into the hospital for an abortion, she winds up in a coma  Susan refuses to let the case be swept under the rug, while Mark's professional ambition has him buying the party line.  Susan finds a disquieting pattern of "freak" comas among healthy young patients (including one mighty healthy young Tom Selleck) and haphazardly steps on ever single toe between her questions and the administration's answers.

Coma is as steeped in the paranoia of the 1970s as the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, and arguably less ham-handed about it.  First of all, there's that newly legal abortion; source of much cultural anxiety.  As a result of exercising her legal right to choose the procedure, Susan's friend Nancy is subjected to 1) a room full of strangers (med students) looking up her lady-biz, 2) doctors sharing meaningful glances about the type of woman who exercises her legal right to the procedure, including a surgeon who makes a point of mentioning that he doesn't judge, 3) Whoops! Coma!  4) death and 5) the possibility of organ theft.  So what say you just think about that choice with a little more terror involved, little lady?  There are several other moments where the movie plays on the concept of medicine moving too fast for people to keep up, and doctors declaring themselves the new gods of society.  Honestly, the Republican National Convention could just show Coma and follow it up with an emphatic "SEE???" to save themselves a considerable amount of huffing and puffing.

Despite Susan being the one who pursues the matter potentially all the way up to the literal bitter end and Mark being a political suck-up, it's suddenly Mark who rescues her and saves the day at the last minute.  While there are themes in Coma, like medical ethics and the privilege of wealth, that are just as relevant today if not more so, there are some dated attitudes toward gender that will not have aged well for all viewers.  Then again, that's still frighteningly cutting-edge for some parts of this country.  I hate to be "that guy" but I'd really be interested in seeing a remake of Coma that dares to deal with the subject matter in a more current and courageous fashion, casting a light on our current culture of paranoia.

It's a tense little film.  It blends the paranoia of conspiracy with some taut cat-and-mouse interplay and some truly creepy set-pieces.  I would gladly trade a few minutes of men telling Susan what she can and can not do for a few minutes of cat-and-mouse.  For as much style as is uses, it looks much less dated than you'd expect.  I think it might seem a little quaint now, with its semi-satiric atmosphere of paranoia that has since been outstripped by our actual living world.

The House Has Hot and Cold Running Ghosts

What would horror be without the occasional surprise now and then?  I'm changing things up a little today by discussing a TV show rather than a film, but then this TV show is at least as good as most horror movies, and quite a bit better than the majority.

TELEVISION:

American Horror Story
Season 1: Murder House - 2011
Created by Brad Falchuk & Ryan Murphy

I'm coming to this one a little late, but then I freely admit that I have gotten to a place in my media life where I can barely stand to watch shows on a weekly basis.  Binge viewing is really the only way to watch the serial narrative anymore.  Obviously it satisfies the "what happens next?" impulse that networks rely upon to emotionally hold viewers hostage, but I find that I simply get more out of the narrative when I'm able to follow it more consistently and deliberately.  American Horror Story has really built up its viewership (and laurels) over the past three seasons, and I finally reached the point where I was ready to invest in a new series.  Each season is an independent narrative, so I am approaching them independently in my consideration.

Season One tells the story of Murder House, an LA mansion built in the 20s and site of more murders than any one person realizes (well, maybe one person).  The story pays homage to the entire haunted house genre, without ever being overly similar to any one story.  Per the conventions of the genre, the story begins with a family moving into the house.  In this case, they are the Harmons; Tom (Dylan McDermott), Vivien (Connie Britton) and Violet (Taissa Farmiga), who bring plenty of their own emotional ghosts with them.  While they had been informed in advance that the previous owners had died in an apparent murder/suicide, and we as viewers were aware from the opening scene that a couple of redheaded brats died there in the 70s, numerous other restless spirits make themselves known -- or not-so-known -- in short order.

Also making themselves known are Constance (Jessica Lange), an omnipresent and socially inappropriate neighbor and her daughter Adelaide, whom we saw as a child in the opening scene, warning the twins of their impending doom.  Constance and Adelaide let themselves into the house so often and so casually that it took a few episodes before I was sure that they weren't ghosts themselves.  Constance clearly knows more than she's telling anyone, and several of the ghosts clearly know Constance.

The first five-or-so episodes hit the viewer pretty hard with a rapid-fire onslaught of supernatural shenanigans.  By the third episode, I couldn't fathom how the family could possibly survive all the way to the end of the series at the pace things were going, and I was partly right about that.  The pace slows down significantly once the initial rush of fear dies down.  The story bogs down somewhat as tensions between characters play out, and the character roster deepens with the revelation of more of the house's history.  By the time the Black Dahlia joins the gang, she feels entirely unnecessary (hot ghost-on-ghost action notwithstanding).  There are so many dynamics between so many characters, both living and dead, that few of them seem to be allowed to play out in fulfilling ways -- especially when so many of them hate Constance, who the producers clearly adore..

There's another pacing issue that surrounds Connie Britton's character, Vivien.  She serves as one of the primary conduits for the narrative.  She's the one with the most logical arc of disbelief to gradual understanding of her situation.  It's Vivien who actually investigates the house's history and recognizes an earlier visitor in an old photo.  She's also just the most likeable.  Violet, their sullen teen daughter is a close second, but her unwillingness to share information of react quite believably when presented with the facts weakens her position.  So Vivien is, by default, not to mention by degree of victimization, our best defined protagonist.  Then she all-but-disappears for a few episodes and it really chokes the narrative.  I get the distinct feeling that Britton may have had a scheduling conflict, because the change in structure just doesn't make sense from a narrative standpoint.

Things do pick up pace as we get closer to the end, and Violet does carry a lot more of the load, but only after a draggy spot where the structure seems to have crumbled a bit.  In fact, the pace accelerates toward the end with more and more revelations and death, but then it comes to an almost screeching halt as the final episode slowly unspools its post-climax denouement.  In this more leisurely paced aftermath, there is a lot of room for questions to come up about inconsistency and illogic.  The show's self-established rules for ghosts don't always apply the same way to all characters, or even to single characters over the span of the season.  At one point, one of the ghosts is motivated to have the house sold so that her body can be dug up from the back yard, thus freeing her, and yet most of the ghosts are not buried on the grounds and are just as trapped.  While they enjoy varying degrees of ability to manifest themselves and interact directly with the living, not one of them ever burns the house down, which seemed the logical conclusion.  In one scene, a ghost stops a loved one from committing suicide, yet is nowhere to be found in the very next scene when others ghosts decide to go ahead and kill off the very same living person.

These inconsistencies are clearly cases of the details taking a backseat to the intended story, and I get that.  I just wish that the writers had been afforded a little extra time to smooth these things out ahead of time.  Murder House clearly emphasizes character and overall narrative arc over things like obedience to their own rules and the momentum of the individual episode.  I'm actually okay with that.  The level of fear that one expects from a two hour horror movie simply would not work across a 12-episode season, and it becomes necessary to vary it a lot more.  After the initial rush, Murder House becomes much more dependent on interpersonal tension and creepiness than instant scares or growing dread.  They do, in fact, do "creepy" really damned well, and there is a greater sense of sadness in loss than almost any horror movie I can think of.  It plays to the strengths of the television format rather than simply trying to make a really long movie, and that's bound to take some rethinking and repurposing of the conventions we've been so trained to expect from the genre.

Horror needed American Horror Story.

Like Grasping a Hot Coal

FILM:

Pumpkinhead - 1988
see link for writing team credits
Directed by Stan Winston

On the subject of anger and vengeance, Buddha said, "Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at another; you are the one who gets burned."  In a genre (and let's face it; a society) that so often takes vengeance as a given, even a virtue, Pumpkinhead is a film that seems to embrace this lesson from Buddha.  In creating an object lesson on this theme, it throws some curveballs at us that stymie common genre expectations, but ultimately leads to an atypically poignant conclusion.

The other thing that Pumpkinhead embraces is kick-ass monster craft.  The film was directed by Stan Winston, who is best known as the legendary make-up and animatronic effects wizard involved in The Terminator, Aliens, Predator and much, much more.  As such, the titular beastie, Pumpkinhead is bizarre and menacing, and goes through an evolution that demonstrates the film's thematic core.

Once upon a time in the Appalachian hills just north of Los Angeles, a widowed and taciturn farmer (Lance Henriksen) lives with his sensitive and quick-witted son.  Early scenes establish the affection between them, so you just know it's going to end poorly for at least one of them.  Meanwhile, we're introduced to a group of young people on their way out to a weekend of dirt bikes and doin' it at a mountain cabin, and because they're young people headed into the woods, you just know that it's going to end poorly for several-if-not-all of them, but especially the greasy dickweasel drinking and driving the Trans Am.

Our ill-fated parties come into contact at the ramshackle general store plopped next to a ribbon of California concrete.  Through an awkward convolution, our farmer and general store operator, Ed Harley, leaves his beloved son at the store while he runs home to pick up some feed for the grandpappy of the dirt-caked hillbilly family.  Two of the young people decide they can't wait five more minutes to get to their cabin (despite covering the last 50 miles in about 20 seconds) and break out the dirt bikes for some totally radical shenanigans, dude.

Engines rev.  Dog bolts.  Boy chases.  Bikes jump.  One misses.  One doesn't.  Billy is down.

This scene is key.  Where most horror films would make all the young city folk crass and indifferent to justify what's coming later, here they make a genuine (if inadequate) effort to get help.  They try to help him.  They run into the store, but there's no phone to be found (nor indeed any outward indication that the roadside shack is connected to any utility services).  Eventually they leave one friend with Billy to wait for help after the previously mentioned dickweasel who hit him splits from the scene because he already has a DUII on his record.  At the cabin, they even try to call emergency services, but dickweasel rips the cord out of the wall and locks his friend in the closet.  What's so "key" about this is that most of the young people are trying to help.  Only the DUII greaseball is demonstrably evil, and possibly his weak, enabling girlfriend.

Finally, Ed gets back and finds his son, battered but still alive.  The young person who stuck around tries to explain that it was an accident, receiving only a hateful glare from Ed in response.  Rather than attempting to get help for his boy, Ed simply takes him home, as is standard behavior for horror movies.  The boy expires and Ed is awash in sorrow and rage.

So he bundles up the boy and puts him in his truck and sets out to find the witch woman of local legend to get satisfaction one way or another... like you do.

In a crumbling shack deep in the swamp (you know, that swamp up on Black Ridge), Ed finds the witch woman who sends him to a lost cemetery to dig something up, and the ritual is performed.  The something rises, and a commitment has been made to the path of vengeance.

What follows should be a fairly rote elimination of young people, and to a large extent that does happen, but then something else happens.  With each death, Ed feels pain, and quickly comes to realize that he is hurting people who don't deserve to die, as well as hurting himself.  He tries to get the witch woman to take it back, but that's really not how witches work, now is it?  He has literally unleashed the beast, and it won't stop until it's done.

Along the way, the son from the hillbilly family gets involved (it was he who told Ed where to find the witch) and like Ed, tries to save the remaining young people out of remorse for his role in summoning the Pumpkinhead demon.

With each death, Ed feels more pain and becomes more savage.  He eventually realizes that Pumpkinhead feels his pain, and another encounter with the demon demonstrates that it is transforming into him, and he into it.  The solution, at this point, is pretty obvious, especially for a man who has little left to live for.

The incident is over, but the legend lives on through this tragedy, and the groundwork for a franchise has been laid.  If you hadn't heard of Pumpkinhead before, you will be even more surprised to learn that there have indeed been a series of films made with the monster.

So, is it good?  Well, as discussed, its twists on standard fare both make it an odd watch, yet provide some of its most satisfying considerations.  It doesn't simply glory in setting up "good guys" and "bad guys."  Ed is absolutely our protagonist (rather than the traditional vacationing young folk), and he is given a powerful cause for his pain and anger, but the way he reacts is a mistake that hurts innocents as well as himself.  The young people are generally more thoughtful and caring than the typical slasher meat.  Yeah, one is a complete and absolute colostomy sack in belted 80s jeans who arguably "deserved" what he got, by horror movie standards. His girlfriend was an accessory and his brother was simply irresponsible, but the other 3 were essentially innocent, and they didn't all survive.  Okay, the witch is definitely going to Hell and she knows it, but she didn't really do anything that Ed didn't ask for and she did try to warn him.

That's vengeance for you.  It's really pretty easy to justify doing wrong things when motivated by anger, but that doesn't make them not wrong things.

Stan Winston was definitely a better monster maker than he was a director.  He clearly learned a thing or two from James Cameron about the use of black and blue palette, and stuck with it.  The acting ranges from Henriksen-reliable to it's-a-good-thing-they're-pretty, but let's face it, that's not what we're here for.  The monster parts are cool, and THAT is what we're here for.  Pumpkinhead is kind of an odd design, but hey, he's a demon.  How do I know they're not weird creatures with crazy-ass shoulder bones?  The witch's swamp shack and the graveyard full of pumpkins were particularly well-designed and creepily beautiful set-pieces.  In the end, it's an uneven but satisfying monster movie with a little something unexpected; a soul.