Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Tediously

There are times, delving into the backlog of cinema, where I sit and wonder, “did this really need a sequel?” Any time a film makes even a moderate amount of money Hollywood lines up to cash in and try again. But even by that metric, some films simply don’t seem like they’d rate a sequel. They weren’t good enough, interesting enough, or successful enough to warrant a second bite at the apple. And then, when you realize a sequel does exist, all you can ask is, “why?” What made a studio say, “yeah, a sequel to this terrible film makes perfect sense!”

This was my thought process when I was digging through classic horror and I realized that Pumpkinhead, the 1988 revenge / monster / slasher film, actually had sequels. Bear in mind that the original film only made $4.4 Mil against a budget of $3.2 Mil. This was at the tail end of the first great slasher craze, when every franchise had already diluted the genre so much that audiences were quickly tuning out. Pumpkinhead came and went with minimal fanfare, and while it did manage to find something of a cult audience on home video, it wasn’t a smash hit worthy of follow-up storytelling.

And yet, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings exists. Produced six years later, in 1994, and made on a shoestring budget, the sequel was shoved out direct-to-video to capitalize on what little fan interest there was for the original film. The resulting movie failed to make much of an impact, with critics at the time lambasting it. Even now, years later, fans don’t seem to care much for the movie, with it scoring only a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. And that’s why years for people to warm the film and some kind of cult to rise around the movie. This was a trash sequel to a trash film, and there’s simply no getting around that.

Sheriff Sean Braddock (Andrew Robinson) used to live in the sleepy little town of Ferren Woods many years before. He’s come back to head up the police force in the town, and also so he can give his teenage daughter, Jenny Braddock (Ami Dolenz), a good place to live. She’s been something of a trouble maker, getting up to antics back when they lived in New York City, and Sean hopes that being in this quiet hometown will get her to settle down and focus on what matters.

Unfortunately Jenny almost immediately falls in with a group of other troublemakers, headed by Danny Dixon (J. Trevor Edmond), and they quickly get her to start skipping class, smoking pot, and doing all the things that the Sheriff wanted to keep her away from. And then the kids go out into the woods and disturb the resident old witch, Miss Osie (Lilyan Chauvin). The witch had been planning to resurrect the corpse of a dead boy she used to care for, Tommy (Jean-Paul Manoux), but the teens mess with the magic and bring the boy back instead… as Pumpkinhead. Now the creature is stalking the woods, killing all the old men that once tortured Tommy back in the day. And once it’s done with those guys, it’ll come for the teens next, unless the Sheriff finds a way to end this curse that’s fallen on the town.

There are a number of issues with Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, many of them owing to the lack of budget and direct-to-video nature of the feature, but the biggest flaw with the film is the story itself. The narrative in this film is overstuffed, with a huge number of ideas all competing with each other, most of which don’t get the time or development they need to actually resonate within the story. It’s a mish-mash of ideas that, in a better script, might have come together but here, in this film, they fail to deliver.

Take, for starters, the fact that Tommy was tortured, and killed, by a group of boys back in the day. That is certainly cause for someone to want to raise up Pumpkinhead (as we saw in the first film) and send the creature out for revenge. Except Miss Ossie spends forty years plotting her revenge. The resurrection of Pumpkinhead, as we saw in the previous movie, is an extreme act, something someone does in a fit of passion over a great wrong that was committed. You don’t spend forty years plotting to kill a bunch of people while those guys go off and live their lives. That’s not how Pumpkinhead is supposed to be used.

But there’s also the fact that Ossie isn’t actually the one to raise Pumpkinhead. The kids do it, and you would think that would actually change the spell. The hate and anger the person feels is part of the fuel for the monster, but if the kids perform the spell instead of Ossie then that would create a different Pumpkinhead, right? Or, more realistically, the spell shouldn’t work at all, not based on everything we know about the spell from the first film. It doesn’t line up or make any kind of real sense.

Even if we set all this aside we then have to deal with the fact that the film spends a lot of time killing off characters we know nothing about. Tommy is brought back so he can find his revenge on the boys that killed him. Our focus isn’t on those guys, though; it’s on a bunch of unrelated teens getting into their own trouble. Setting up a storyline about generational revenge is interesting, but for us to invest in that story we have to care about the guys getting killed. The film never makes that investment, instead assuming some (poorly staged) violence and (an extreme lack of) gore will be enough to make us care. Characters matter, and the characters in Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings never get the kind of development they need.

Plus, honestly, the connection between the Sheriff and his home town is pretty underbaked as well. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Sheriff as a character… although that’s probably because he’s played by Andrew Robinson, everyone’s favorite Cardassian tailor from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Robinson does what he can to elevate the material he’s given, but the fact is that if the Sheriff hailed from a small town where guys went around killing teens, and where a cursed monster supposedly roams the hills, you would think he’d have maybe some qualms about movie back to that town with his family. Just a hunch, I don’t think he’d do that.

And then we have all the flaws that come with the small budget: bad production values, cheap sets, cheaper action, and a monster design that feels like they unpacked props from the previous film and just tried to make everything work. The film has a real lack of horror to it because it’s so cheaply and shoddily made. Somewhere in this mess is probably a concept that could have worked, but it would have required not just a rewrite of the script but also a real budget that could have done the monster and its violent ways real justice.

Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings is a bad film by any measure. One decent performance doesn’t make up for just how truly awful the production is, from beginning to end. This is a shallow, empty monster film with only a couple of tiny, worthy ideas. Considering the first film wasn’t very good, it’s shocking they made a second. But to then decide to do it so cheaply, and so terribly, I just don’t know why they bothered at all.