“Keep away from Pumpkinhead, unless you’re tired of living.
His enemies are mostly dead. He’s mean and unforgiving.
Laugh at him and you’re undone, but in some dreadful fashion.
Vengeance, he considers fun and plans it with a passion.
Time will not erase or blot a plot that he is brewing.
It’s when you think that he’s forgot, he’ll conjure your undoing.
Bolted doors and windows barred, guard dogs prowling in the yard,
Won’t protect you in your bed. Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead.”

Stan Winston was a legendary special effects artist. He worked on iconic films such as The Thing, The Terminator, Predator, Aliens, and Jurassic Park. As the story goes, when the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group sent him a script for Pumpkinhead in hopes that he’d do the creature design work, he rather envisioned the project as an ideal opportunity to spread his directorial wings. He made his acceptance of the effects gig contingent on getting to sit in the director’s chair. Passing off design work to a number of his protégés, he spent his time refining the script and leading the production, though his practiced hand is still evident in the polished effects. When he’s playing to his strengths, Pumpkinhead is a very effective dark fantasy. Otherwise, it is a fairly generic slasher flick that shambles along in decent B movie fashion, neither exceptional nor bland, but adequate for showcasing its eponymous demon.

There’s not much plot here. After a creepy flashback prologue set in the 1950s, widower Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen) runs a ramshackle general store out in the dusty country where he lives with his young son Billy (Matthew Hurley) and does business with outcast mountain people who bathe twice a year. When he steps out to run an errand, Billy wanders out into a nearby field after his dog, where he’s accidentally killed in a hit-and-run dirt bike accident. With memories of a harrowing evening of his youth playing in his mind, Ed seeks out the hinterlanders and asks for directions to the nearest witch doctor, a crinkly old woman named Haggis (Florence Schauffer). Carrying his dead son to the wizened old crone, he requests that she work her arcane magic on the boy. She can’t resurrect Billy from the dead, but she offers Mr. Harley the next best thing. Instead of getting his son back, she’ll sic a demon on those murderous punks. Exhuming a corpse from an unmarked mountain grave, Ed brings it to the witch’s cottage, where she supplies it with blood from both father and son. The rotted corpse regenerates and rises as the spindly, Xenomorphesque demon known as Pumpkinhead.

Meanwhile, huddled up in a small cabin, the raucous city folk who killed Billy contemplate their situation. Joel (John D’Aquino), who has a similar rap on his permanent record, will not allow the others to help in any way. They argue and suggest courses of action until Pumpkinhead arrives and begins slaying them one by one. There are some truly graphic deaths that live up Winston’s reputation for effects, including a man being lifted off his feet by a stab through the abdomen with the barrel of a rifle and a face smashed through a window. Through the use of flashbacks, half-remembered anecdotes, and rumor, a folkland fable is built up around the backwoods demon, drawing out various rules and structures regarding who Pumpkinhead will kill and whether or not it is okay to come to the aid of those who are “marked.” More and more people fall victim to Pumpkinhead, and although this may be the revenge that Ed sought, he now faces an unintended side effect, namely, each time Pumpkinhead kills, Ed is overcome by visions of the slain person’s pain and suffering.

A decent B grade horror flick, Pumpkinhead scores most of its points in its creative realization of its titular hellspawn. Buoyed by competent lighting, a rustic soundtrack, and solid sound effects, the centerpiece of the film is the terrifying costume worn by effects artist Tom Woodruff Jr. Make-up, prosthetics, and viscera abound, as the lanky, lumbering fiend goes about his mission of death. Although it suffers from poor acting (aside from industry veteran Henricksen) and a faceless quality to its victims, Pumpkinhead is a worthwhile curio for genre fans or those interested in stellar effects work.