Poor Tommy...from Elephant Boy to Pumpkinhead...

Dolenz receives a night visitor in Jeff Burr's Pumpkinhead II: Bloodwings (1993)

Understanding the difficult production history of Pumpkinhead II gives me pause to let director Jeff Burr have it. To tell you the truth, technically I think Burr did all he could with what he had available to him. He tries to utilize flashy camera work and some lighting aesthetics to compensate for the bone-headed script and characters populating this reimaging of the Pumpkinhead origin story. 

This go-around, a misshapen-faced orphan boy, left to fend for himself, getting food from a kindly wilderness witch who sees after him the best she could as a kind of surrogate guardian angel, is attacked brutally by a gaggle of high school auto club scumbags with jackets, calling themselves the Red Wings. Pummeled with baseball bats, hung on a metal hook over an abandoned, seemingly bottomless well, and sliced numerous times by the Red Wings’ leader, Tommy succumbs to his injuries. Tommy has some sort of odd physical, spiritually symbiotic link to the witch where she feels his pain and later, once he’s conjured by a Pumpkinhead spell thanks to some stupid teenagers [natch], realizes his rage, literally suffering as the creature kills in revenge for the crimes against the malformed-faced boy (think The Elephant Man) that didn’t deserve his injustice.   

Andrew Robinson really deserves better than to be stuck in a film such as this, to tell you the truth. He’s a very good actor squandered here. He does his best, but this is simply beneath his talents. A sheriff who must keep a straight face when trying to talk a creature out of killing his daughter (played by direct-to-video 90s scream queen, Ami Dolenz). Yep, he is pleading in a desperate attempt to reason with a giant monster. Oh, and the piece of work that is the hospital room sequence where even the most professional of actors would probably have to look in a mirror and wonder where it all went wrong: Robinson’s sheriff and the local coroner (Gloria Hendry; the Bond film, Live and Let Die) must question the rising corpse of the witch who had just flatlined about the Pumpkinhead creature and how to stop it. 

The film just goes off into some bizarre areas. When Pumpkinhead emerges to kill the Knox Brothers (one of which is played by Kane Hodder; Mr. Jason Voorhees himself), the bulbs (these two run a cock fighting farm) explode, the wind picks up, and atmospheric conditions just go amok. When the judge of the town (Steve Kanaly of Dallas, the television show) leaves his kitchen into the living room, there are painted blood wings throughout the walls: when would the creature have time to do this? Flames rise up from the well when Pumpkinhead falls into it…why? Is hell really down there as is foretold? 

Why would Danny Dixon, even if he’s thrill-seeking, wish to conjure up a demon? Who does that for kicks? Why would you endanger yourself in such a way? I mean Danny (J. Trevor Edmond; Return of the Living Dead III) literally beats the witch with a flashlight just to take a vial of blood, then leaves her to burn alive in her home, as he enforces the gang of pals he hangs with to scurry off to the car. He wanted to conjure a creature that badly! It is rather absurd if you think about it.

 But that’s the problem here…the movie was made so quickly, with such little money, that getting a half-decent storyline out of this was unlikely to begin with. Burr rushing in to try and scrape together something meaningful is asking a lot. He does apply some skill visually to this, but the monster attacks are a real mixed bag: mostly shitty. I don’t blame him, though, as the gore effects of the 90s were being held from really going for the jugular. You can really tell how restrained this production had to be. When Joe Unger (Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III) is dismembered in his barn, Burr clearly is a victim of the cautious graphic violence era of the MPAA. 

Not only was Burr dealing with little money, but he also had to contend with fingers wagging at him telling him to not let his movie get too gory. So I don’t blame him necessarily for how sloppy the editing and story turn out. I just felt you can see where the budget was a burden to the director. Whenever Pumpkinhead, for instance, is on the attack, the editing and camera rarely ever have it and victims within the same frame. The attacks are kind of slipshod and haphazard. There just wasn’t enough time or money to get satisfying carnage cohesively on screen. You sometimes see the rubbery clawed hands of the creature grab the torsos and heads of victims, and Unger is lifted off his feet once in a rather poor effects sequence which clearly shows the limitations of what the crew could do in regards to seeing a monster in frame picking up and tossing characters around. It is what is unfortunately.

The refurbished Pumpkinhead origin story just doesn’t have the same kind of boogeyman horror show theatricality as the old one from 1988. There’s too much gloss to the 1993 film while the 88 version just had this Southern Gothic atmosphere that grabbed me. Burr knows how to do that, too, as can be seen in his From a Whisper to a Scream (1987). Winston achieved a lot with a smaller budget but I can’t imagine it was same sort of rushed job that Burr was saddled with.

 Still, I can’t say the film was dull. I still had a decent time. It isn’t good from a plot-sense, and creature feature aspects could have been better. But the creature looks cool, as Burr and company make sure to get it in shots in all its glory. I credit them for that the most…we get plenty of Pumpkinhead. The design of the creature remains devoted to the Winston film. Everything else, including where the body is buried (in a grave with a pentagram design created above his grave), just about is updated/changed from the previous film. 

Quigley picking up her paycheck.

Living up to her mantra: screaming like the queen she is.

There’s mention of if you conjure the Pumpkinhead it will kill for you; in exchange, you give up your soul to a cursed eternal damnation. But in this film the witch, while suffering from the fire and attack by Danny, encourages Pumpkinhead to rise. Blood from a vial Danny stole, sprinkled on Tommy’s dug up body (yep, Danny’s gang, shovels in hand, go to digging), also is a catalyst in the monster’s rise from the grave to get vengeance on the Red Wings, now much older and a sorry lot still. Only Unger seems to recognize his mistake, while the Judge just shrugs off the murders of those once his friends until he gets his own comeuppance. 

It is funny seeing President Obama’s basketball buddy (and once a forensics scientist on CSI: NY) Hill Harper as a tag-along pal of Danny’s, rather afraid of him and compliant. Also amusing is seeing him as the boyfriend of Punky Brewster herself, of all people, Soleil Moon Frye. Frye’s character is colorless and lacks in real personality. All that life seems drained from this particular character. Just no sense of purpose whatsoever, and that is unfortunate as the cast of characters could have used some color to them. Danny is just a douchebag who happens to have gained the attraction and desire by Dolenz who even fantasizes about making out with her in her bed, before PH crashes the dream to scare the shit out of her. 

Dolenz is sure nice to look at, though. By this time, she had already starred in Ticks, Witchboard II, Stepmonster, and Children of the Night. After PH II it seems Dolenz decided to call it a day on horror films hitting rental store shelves. A lot of teenagers like yours truly were having naughty thoughts about Dolenz in the 90s, for sure. She’s okay, here. She is the girl who wants to walk on that razor’s edge of danger, interested in the bad boy (Danny shows a choice few positive qualities, and keeps her in trouble almost every time they’re together), speaking up about saving the witch, not an active participant in Tommy’s resurrection, and disgusted with Danny when it is revealed he attacked the witch, leaving her to die. Then, as you might figure, Dolenz is the last remaining person left in the destructive path of PH, before Sheriff Daddy comes to her rescue.

This film does look slapped together, but I think you can see there’s talent involved in the making of it during certain instances. Burr has never really had very many opportunities to make the film *he* wants. His first film (the aforementioned Whisper) seems to be one of the only few he was able to make in a way he’s most proud. This one, on the other hand, works in spurts but fails overall to be anything less than a video rental dusted off on occasion for revisit. When a director has his name on a product, though, regardless of how it was made or the factors that hampered it from being exactly what he wanted, often the one to blame is the filmmaker in the hot seat behind the camera calling the shots…in this case, it appears Burr had three weeks, a small budget under a mil, and a minute window open to prepare for PH II. How could a movie not suffer from that? Corman used to do this to young filmmakers all the time, though, so economical (or poverty row) productions can keep a vision from meeting its full potential.

To conclude, Linnea Quigley fans will be a bit disappointed as her character is pointless. She doesn't really even give us the typically good look at her nice naked body, as Burr opted to shoot her from behind while riding some slob in a shack with boxes of merchandise he ripped off as a postman! She does get to scream, but the importance of her character is so useless, it is kind of a depressing afterthought. This was the way she was starting to become used, sadly. As poor as Jack-O might be, Quigley has a decent role in it at least. That can't be said for this film.