Review: Pumpkinhead II - Blood Wings
Early nineties, low budget, monster movie sequel... This has "so bad its good" written all over it, right? Right?
The first Pumpkinhead movie, released in 1988, is not exactly hailed as a horror classic, but it does have a modest reputation as a fun monster movie. I'm pretty sure I've seen it before, so I opted instead to watch the 1993 sequel for the marathon this year. Now the nineties are not a particularly strong era for horror, and its usually not a good sign when a sequel is produced without the involvement of the writers, director, or actors that brought the first film to life. Not exactly a recipe for success going in, but perhaps a recipe for a successful disaster? You can't write for a horror marathon for more than a decade and not explore the concept of "so bad it's good", a topic which I've touched on many times already. This time, though, I brought a chart! I am so committed to exploring the world of horror with you, faithful reader, and so uncommitted to seeming cool online apparently, that I put my excel skills to use and produced a visual aid for this review.
When you plot your possible enjoyment of a horror movie against said movie's quality, the data behaves like you would expect at the start: High quality means more enjoyment, worse quality means less enjoyment. Then, once the quality really bottoms out, the enjoyment starts to spike again - the aforementioned "so bad it's good" effect. Unfortunately, this is an oversimplification. In reality, there are a hundred elements that make up a film's quality, and each one could be plotted separately. Some of them - lighting quality, for example - don't have the convenient hockey stick turn at the end: If you can't see, you can't see, and that is never going to make a film more enjoyable. For the elements that offer perverse enjoyment when they get really bad, you have to stack enough of them up together to get what you're looking for. Good acting and cinematography can't salvage a terrible script, but they can prevent it from being the type of movie you seek out to laugh at with your friends.
Sadly, I have to report that every component of Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings falls somewhere on the right hand side of the chart, but too far left to trigger an upswing in enjoyment. The script? Subpar but not nonsensical. The acting? Bad but not atrocious. The monster design and puppetry? Annoyingly competent. They took a middle-of-the-road monster movie featuring Lance Henriksen, subtracted Lance Henriksen, and did everything worse but not worse enough. The plot, if it matters, involves a bunch of awful teenagers murdering a disfigured and outcast teen. Fast forward thirty years, and a brand new batch of awful teenagers conduct some sort of ritual to resurrect the murdered boy, who returns as Pumpkinhead, a giant gray demon-man. Pumpkinhead goes on a murder spree targeting the teens (now men) who killed him, and eventually the ones who brought him back. The police chief, a Temu Pedro Pascal, tries to stop the monster before his own awful teenage daughter is next on the list.
Hey look, I didn't click on the thumbnail for Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings expecting to watch a good movie. Nobody decides to watch a movie like this with an expectation like that. What we all hope for, the dragon we are chasing, is the movie that does enough things wrong, while doing the non-negotiable things well enough, to end up on the far right of that chart. Quality low, enjoyment high. It's an elusive target that is even harder to hit when you aim for it. Did I hate watching this movie? No. I still kind of liked it, but I've decided I am a little too gracious with bad movies on this blog. If every day's a sunny day, then what's a sunny day, y'know? Don't go watch Pumpkinhead II, invest your 90 minutes on a dart throw that has a chance to get you all the way to the top of the so-bad-it's-good scale instead.
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