Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Vengeance: The Demon

• Directed by Stan Winston
• Written by Mark Patrick Carducci and Gary Gerani
• Starring
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Cynthia Bain
  • Jeff East
  • John D’Aquino
  • Kimberly Ross

Despite appearances, horror films as a whole are pretty emotionless stories. Sure, you’ve got plenty of screaming and cowering, but without a feel for the individual characters, such expressions of fear really only qualify as demonstrations of the “fight or flight” instinct, present in just about every form of life. And odds are, aside from fear symptoms, the only pseudo-emotions in nine out of ten horror flicks are horniness (and I’m not sure if that really qualifies as an emotion so much as another instinct) and the grating irritation demonstrated by the pointless bickering that characterizes far too much of the dialogue.

That’s probably why Pumpkinhead has managed to maintain a healthy following since its release. The plot may not be the most original, but the movie manages to evoke some true emotion from and about its characters, and renters have responded to that with a respectable level of fandom for the last fourteen years.

Lance Henriksen when life is good.

Not that fear doesn’t have a significant presence — this is a horror film, after all, and the first thing we see is young Ed Harley (Chance Corbitt Jr.) cowering in his bed in his redneck parents’ backwoods cabin as outside, a neighbor is hunted and mauled by a tall, gaunt something.

Thirty years later, the adult Harley (Lance Henriksen) still lives in the hinterlands of Appalachia (for which, admittedly, the Californian shooting locations make a poor substitute) with his young son Billy (Matthew Hurley), supporting them from his small grocery store/vegetable stand. It’s here that other emotions make their presence known, as the scenes with Harley and Billy have a genuine affection to them, beyond the normal “mark the person as doomed by declaring your love for them” found so often.

Whoops, I hope I didn’t spoil anything for you there. Because Billy isn’t long for this world. A sixpack of trouble shows up in the form of a half-dozen college kids, off for a weekend in a mountain cabin. You may think it a flaw that the six pretty much blur together for most of the movie; however, when you consider that most attempts to differentiate such a crowd usually degenerates into slapping each with a stereotype label (the Jock, the Brain, the Slut, etc.) with such diversity that you can’t imagine all of them ever interacting socially, somehow their uniformity is refreshing.

Lance Henriksen the rest of the time.

The only one you really need to know right now is Joel (John D’Aquino), the designated bad boy who drinks beer while driving and looks upon the locals with derision. It’s his idea to take the trailered dirtbikes out for a spin when they make a pitstop at Harley Grocery. And while Harley’s back up at the house on an errand for a local customer, it’s Joel’s bike which manages to come over a hill, land on little Billy and kill him.

While Joel is hightailing it to the cabin in a panic and preventing the others forcibly from calling for help (he’s already on probation for a previous injury/accident), Harley discovers his boy and reacts with understandable rage. He approaches the patriarch of a redneck family, Wallace, (Buck Flower) for help finding the old witch woman who’s fabled to live somewhere in the mountains — the only one with power to help him get revenge. Wallace refuses to help, even in the face of such tragedy, but his grandson Bunt (Brian Bremer) agrees to point him on the right road to where the old conjurer Haggis (Florence Schauffler) lives in a mist-enshrouded bog.

Harley gives his all to Haggis, not for resurrection, which is beyond her power, but for vengeance — for the summoning of the fabled Pumpkinhead, whispered about for generations as a demon of revenge. She has him retrieve a misshapen, worm-eaten body from a decrepit graveyard and, with Harley’s and Billy’s blood, brings it to life.

And Pumpkinhead is on the job.

Methinks her powers come from that preternatural ear.

Since Stan Winston, the director here, was the award-winning FX man on Alien, many people are quick to point out similarities between the titular creatures of the two movies. In reality, the correspondences are lesser than they may seem; both are tall critters with elongated heads, but the unstoppable alien is designed for sleekness and a personality-less efficiency at killing. In contrast, Pumpkinhead is as personalitied as the Appalachian settlements themselves, and its face reflects a personality of cruelty and sadistic playfulness — not in the sense of bad one-liners a la Freddy Krueger, but along the lines of an intelligent cat playing with its catch out of sheer malice.

And even though Harley is looking for revenge for his son’s death, sympathy for the kids isn’t hard to come by. It was, after all, an accident; and after holding his friends hostage for hours, even Joel comes around and decides to do the right thing. Not that that matters to Pumpkinhead; he’s on the clock, and starts picking the friends off one by one, guilty and innocent alike, making sure the deaths are witnessed by the others to work them into a state of panic.

And the enormity of what he’s done is driven home to Harley — first by the grief that assaults him once his rage is exhausted, second by a waking dream he has of his son’s corpse sitting up and asking, “What did you do, Daddy?” and third by the visions and tremors that assault him as Pumpkinhead kills each of his targets. He sees their deaths; he feels their pain; and when he confronts Haggis (boy, everything’s sure within easy commuting distance in the back country ) and tries to call it off, she ridicules his naivete. “What did you think — that it’d be easy? Neat and clean and painless?” she cackles.

I hope that’s his tail.

This is what sets Pumpkinhead above other revenge-horror movies: an awareness that revenge can breed more problems and poison the soul worse than the offense being avenged. It’s not a new or particularly deep idea, but even the fact that there’s thought to be derived from it puts it head and shoulders over most of its compatriots on the horror rental shelf. It certainly brings it above the level of a simple morality play, which is the best face most killing-machine movies can put on their proceedings.

Of course, none of that could be effectively conveyed without the actors’ performances, and Lance Henriksen distinguishes himself well here. Most of his filmography is filled with movies in which he was called upon to portray (at most) one emotion; here, he plays the range of feelings, good and bad, and his deepening conflict and disgust at what he’s done, inciting him finally to attempt to save the surviving kids from the demon he’s unleashed, is more compelling to watch than the seven-foot latex creature. (Not that the creature’s bad too look at — no, you have to wait until the vastly inferior sequel before you see the figurative zippers on the suit. In fact, the entire movie’s visually beautiful — or ugly in a beautifully-realized way — with just enough overt stylization to heighten the impression of fairy tale-like archetypes at work.)

“CHEESE!!”

You want spoilers? Tough. All that I’ll tell you is that the method of final defeat of the demon isn’t as gimmicky as is often seen, and ties directly into the identification of Pumpkinhead as the unstoppable avatar of Harley’s own rage. In many ways, the tale is a tragedy in the proper sense — the story of an admirable man, Ed Harley, whose downfall stems from his own flaws, and the catharsis to which can’t legitimately have a happy ending. It’s a movie that tends to stick with viewers a little while, and thus remain in most store’s rental stock.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 7
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• spring-loaded dogs: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Jandi Swanson (one of the Wallace grandchildren) played “Katie” in the TNG episode “When the Bough Breaks”