Review of Pumpkinhead

"Pumpkinhead" was the first directing job for make-up wizard Stan Winston. You can hardly overlook what Winston's main occupation had been so far. Pumpkinhead, the monster itself, does look pretty neat (even if its design is totally ripped off of H.R. Giger's Alien), but that doesn't mean that we should see the creature as often as we do. In fact, Winston seems so proud of the job his make-up team has done that he wants to show as much of it as possible and we all know that less is often more when it comes to horror movies. "Pumpkinhead" leaves nothing to your imagination and that's not scary at all. In the whole movie there are hardly any effective jumps, because Winston fails to create any kind of suspense or atmosphere. The score gives it all away beforehand and most of the sets look so cheap, they could have been taken right out of an episode of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" (a series more horrific than "Pumpkinhead" could ever hope to be). And don't expect much gore, either. The most explicit death scene you'll see is one in which a guy get's stabbed and thrown into the air, which isn't as exciting as it might sound. However, "Pumpkinhead" suffers the most from its bad script in combination with horrible editing. What could have been a half-decent story, was totally ruined by unbelievable characters, idiotic dialog and silly cuts from one scene to the next. By 1989 such mistakes just weren't forgivable anymore. Seriously, this is the kind of movie a bunch of teenagers would make if you'd give them the equipment and teach them a thing or two about how to handle it. For anybody over the age of 14 "Pumpkinhead" is hardly enjoyable unless you have a liking for cheesy 80's horror flicks (like I do). Everybody else should stay away.