While the first Pumpkinhead has been hailed as a classic for a number of reasons, the same cannot be said about the sequel. It is very sad to see such great movies trip at the starting line. Even Hellraiser at least had one good sequel to its name. Pumpkinhead thinks that telling a scary story is showing random horrific things happen, making it vaguely revenge plot-ish. Then, when the audience is climbing the walls with boredom, just exposition dump the entire mystery to the main characters and have a final, pitiful climactic scene. That's this movie in a nutshell.
What pains the brain is that Andrew Robinson decided to play the father in this movie, rather than returning for Hellraiser II: Hellborne. He still gives a decent performance, but you can tell the director has no idea what he's doing. The so-called "acting" in this movie is just painful to watch. The blood and violence effects were made practically, but also very, very poorly. This is immediately apparent in the very first scene, where we see the.... WOW I cannot believe I'm saying this, but the child of Pumpkinhead, the human hybrid child of Pumpkinhead. His mother, who I would assume has gone through miles of therapy by this point, feeds him some... stuff. I don't know what it is. It's all in black and white and could either be patties of meat or just straight up dung.
So, the plot thickens when some jocks come out of nowhere and kill him. Yeah, guess he was just sitting around and eating a little too casually for their liking. So they pull out pocket knives and stab him to death in front of his mother, who feels his pain for absolutely no reason. Well, it's because Lance Hendrickson could feel Pumpkinhead's pain in the first movie and they wanted it to connect somehow. Just go with it, bro.
Cut to years later, and we're following a family that we don't like and can't act. The daughter, Jenny, hangs out with some of the STUPIDEST human beings on God's green Earth, and as stated before, Robinson is trying his best as the father, but what are you going to do? Seriously, they just thought it'd be a great idea to check out this old house and hit this old lady with a car after driving at night without headlights. And just a few scenes before this, her father tells Jenny she may not want to hang out with these kids. And of course, they beat the hell out of the old lady after she... has a miraculous recovery from being hit? Oh, who cares.
Then they raise Pumpkinhead, because of course they do. They burn down the woman's house. Seriously, whoever wrote this garbage needs to have their license taken away, if a writing license were a thing. Now, Pumpkinhead is coming out to kill them and they really deserve it, so who cares? The murders are lame, I mean, they're not as bad as the acting but they're horrid. The first victim was one of the morons who killed him at the beginning of the movie and he pulled out a shotgun, only to walk toward him with it.
Every single time Pumpkinhead is on screen, for some reason, the movie throws an eyepiercing strobe light into your face. It adds nothing other than the danger of those who have epilepsy. Now, there is one great thing about these murders. They just so happened to be the horror legends, Kane Hodder and R.A. Mihailoff, or Jason Vorhees in multiple Friday the 13th and Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3. That doesn't make the movie any better, but it's a nice little factoid.
Throughout the film, the Sheriff has been investigating, unable to put everything together. Seriously, these scenes go on for an eternity. All of this comes to a head when the old lady decides to die... then come back to life and tell them literally everything, including where to go. They find out that it's killing the ones who killed her son, then it's going after the kids who ran her over. Seriously, no one could put any of this together from the evidence?! This entire movie runs on idiocy!
Obviously, when I say the stupidest people on this Earth, that only becomes compounded as Jenny's "friends" become more and more paranoid about the sudden murders going on. This comes to a head when they go and check the corpse to see that it did, indeed, rise from the grave. So their group's "leader", Danny, pulls a gun on them and holds them for... literally no reason. They threaten to go to the police, but by this point, people are literally being murdered and this is just a new level of stupid. Even when all of them say to hell with it and run, Danny's running after them with the gun still pointed at them. There is a literal monster coming toward them and it takes him forever to finally shoot the monster. Not that it does anything. It's already killed all of his friends by this point.
Once the moron, Danny, gets his head ripped off, Jenny is mortified and Pumpkinhead turns onto her. Earlier in the film, they allude to a child saving Pumpkinhead's *wretch* son when he was a boy. This stops him long enough for the Sheriff's posse to shoot him to death, now that guns actually work on him. Yeah, then you can see the strings as his arms flap like... uh... wings I guess.
That was Blood Wings and it is quite uniquely terrible. There is a scene where two old ladies ask the Sheriff what's going on and... yeah the scene was bad and it didn't need to be in the movie. The director just needed to show that the public is scared.... oh no. There are better ways to do this but this film is not worried about such things as... "quality". If you like bad horror movies, this is a must-see. If you're a fan of the first film, I'm sorry that you've probably already seen this. Just don't be expecting the catacombs to venture any further into this series. There's already and entire line of Hellraiser sequels that the evil of the core has demanded we go. The Bloodpool rises with such filth!
No comments:
Post a Comment