Pumpkinhead Ashes to Ashes

Product Description Horror icon Doug Bradley (Hellraiser movies) and Lance Henriksen (Pumpkinhead, Scream 3) star in this riveting continuation of the Pumpkinhead series. When the residents of a small town discover that their local mortician has been dumping the corpses of their loved ones into a swamp, rather than properly cremating them, they seek the assistance of a witch named Haggis to mete out justice. Haggis summons the demon Pumpkinhead to kill those responsible for the desecration. The only thing that can stop Pumpkinhead is an eccentric, small-town physician who is set on killing the townspeople who have unleashed the demon. Amazon.com Special effects legend Stan Winston's directorial debut, Pumpkinhead (1989), enjoyed a respectable cult following on video thanks to its impressive title monster and the lead performance of character actor Lance Henriksen, and this sequel (the third in the franchise to date), aims to evoke the original with several nods to that film as well as some good old-fashioned gore. Henriksen himself returns in a cameo as the spirit of his character from the first movie, who appears to warn the people of a rural Southern village against evoking the demon Pumpkinhead; unfortunately, it appears that the town doctor (Doug Bradley, better known as Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies) has been desecrating the bodies of the recently deceased, and the locals feel that they have no other choice but to summon the spindly-legged, reptile-faced monster to get their revenge. Director Jake West is mindful of the first film's somewhat elaborate rules (among others, those that helped bring Pumpkinhead back to life suffer with each fresh kill), and he eschews the campy tone of the ghastly 1994 sequel Pumpkinhead: Blood Wings. But a low budget, a hit-or-miss cast, and some shoddy CGI effects which occasionally push the film into "so-bad-it's-good" territory hamper him throughout the picture. Still, for fans of the original, this is a entirely watchable return to Pumpkinhead country. -- Paul Gaita