Pumpkinhead

  Of all the horror movies I loved as a kid, Pumpkinhead might be the one I most misunderstood. To be fair, a lot of that is by design: It was the first movie directed by special effects master Stan Winston, and its monster featured heavily in the runup to its release in specialist magazines like Fangoria*. Even the premise is a bit of a misdirection; A creature feature/slasher where a bunch of teens get picked off one in a cabin in the woods...

 But the script (by Mark Patrick Carducci and Gary Gerani, with story help from Winston and Richard Weinman) has a little more on its mind than just that. I remembered it for its ambiance and the incredible creature effects; Upon this rewatch I was surprised to find it's a relatively sophisticated fable on the cost of revenge.

 The prologue is set in 1957, when a family lock their doors and refuse the calls for help from a neighbour as he's attacked (and killed) by a monster. Their son does get to see the killing through a window.
 That kid grows up to be Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen, giving it his 110% as always), a shop owner in the same stretch of nowhere he grew up in. He's a widower raising a tiny kid of his own - no prizes for guessing that the kid's not going to last long, but the setup is sweet enough to ensure that when the inevitable happens it'll be enough of a low blow.

 The agents of chaos arrive soon after Harley and his son set up shop for the day - a bunch of boisterous young adults off to the wilderness to take their dirt bikes out for a spin (or, as it was the 80s, do some motocross).
 Ed goes off on an errand, leaving the little one to mind the store (it's a pretty WTF moment - the kid is about five!); Harley Jr. almost immediately runs off from his post, chasing after his dog, and gets run over by one of the dirt bikes.

 And here's where the script starts distinguishing itself from most other slashers: the young ones try to do right by the circumstances. Well, most of them (Jeff East, Kerry Remsen, Cynthia Bain, Joel Hoffman and the always lovely Kim Ross); There's the one fuck-up, Joel (John D'Aquino), the one who actually squished the kid, who's a grade-A asshole from the beginning.
 The others tolerate Joel because he's good at motocross - when one of the others comments on him being a jerk, pre-accident, another one pipes in to say 'yeah, but he's a talented jerk.' Well, let's see how that's going to work out for you, champ. We keep choosing to ignore warning signs and enable assholes into positions where they can cause damage...

 To Joel's 'credit', Harley Jr.'s death is truly accidental - it's not like Joel did anything wrong whatsoever. But his reaction afterwards is indefensible: he takes his girl and flees the scene while his friends debate how to contact the authorities, and later cuts off the phone line at the cabin when they try to call the police. Turns out he's already on probation for a recent, similar accident! Panicked, he basically threatens everyone else into submission while he tries to work out what to do.

 Meanwhile, Ed returns to find his dying son in the care of one of the tourists, who explains what happened. Ed wordlessly takes his son back to the house, where he soon expires. Soon afterwards he goes off in search of a witch that lives in the mountains hoping she can bring the kid back to life.
 The witch, who lives in a wonderfully constructed set and is called Haggis (sigh), says she can do no such thing. But... she can offer a means to revenge in the same monster Ed saw when he was growing up, though there's a terrible cost.

 And this is how Pumpkinhead is finally loosed upon the frightened kids over at their cabin. The monster is a wonderful creation, a really expressive mixture of suit (worn by another effects legend, Tom Woodruff Jr.) and puppetry that's very recognizably made by the same mind that gave us the queen alien in Aliens (and there's more than a little of the original alien's design recognizable in the beast's spindly arms and legs). 
 This is, ironically, the most disappointing part of the movie to my eyes these days. The monster, however cool it is, is fairly static, and the film's budget (and possibly Winston's limitations as a director) cause a disconnect between it and the mayhem it causes; the kills are fairly rote, with a lot of grabbing from off-screen and dragging victims around, making the slasher portion of the film slightly underwhelming and killing off any chance it had to actually be scary.

 More interestingly, as each teen is killed, Ed feels the murder through some sort of psychic link, and soon realizes he's made a terrible mistake. This being Lance Henriksen, he immediately goes out to make it right with a shotgun.
 All this all leads to a pretty satisfying climax, concept-wise if not in the sort of '80s practical-effects-laden fireworks you'd expect given its pedigree (which is a huge shame, because a Chekhov's fire thrower makes a return from an early appearance). So it's maybe not the best ending possible, but it provides a good conclusion to everything that's gone before and provides a very clever twist of a final scene.

 For all the hype around the monster, the movie's main weapon is Henriksen, who provides a lot of heft to the film's drama. The script is a bit bare-bones and unsubtle, but its ideas are sound and the way it mixes its elements is fairly unconventional; It doesn't really provide a lot of personality to its characters, but it's remarkably compassionate towards them even as it lines them up for slaughter. People very, very rarely deserve what's coming to them in slasher movies, but it's rare to see that acknowledged and baked into the script.
 The cinematography (Bojan Bazelli) is mostly excellent; Far too much of the film takes place on dark, blue-tinted wood, but these scenes contrast nicely with the orange-hued interiors. The are a ton of beautiful and expansive sets, as well - this is a ridiculously atmospheric movie:

 As big as it is among horror nerds, it seems to be strictly second- or third-tier even amongst '80s horror b-movies. I'm not even talking about it being eclipsed by Hellraiser, but whenever horror films of the time are discussed, Phantasm or Basket Case are likely to be mentioned a lot earlier and more often than this... which is sad, but feels about right. As interesting as it is it kind of flubs the genre elements, leaving behind something that's more akin to a fairy tale or dark fantasy than the slasher shape it draws out for itself.
 Still, it's a very, very good film that deserves to be remembered.

*: Not that that aspect was visible when I was growing up in Argentina, but by the time I got around to the movie a couple years later I'd seen all the back issues.