of? 

      So there I sat, whiskey in hand, and the gears began to turn.

      Because of what was on the TV, it would have to be a Pauly Shore comedy. But he's never enough on his own to pull off a truly shitty movie. There's no rule that says a shitty comedy has to have only one comedic lead. There are more than enough classic comedies starring whole teams of funny men, much less the litany of buddy comedies. Who could star alongside Pauly Shore and make a buddy comedy fall apart in the right way? It has to be someone with a track record of shittiness that at least equals if not surpasses Shore's oeuvre. On a stool, a few sips lighter in the glass, I knew there was only one man who would be a proper counterpart to Shore. Only one man who has been embraced by Hollywood execs yet so reviled by both the movie going public and the critical establishment. Only one man who, thinking back on the 1990s in comedy, a person could be forgiven if they confused with Pauly Shore. That man is Rob Schneider. 

      He's been in my mind's eye of late because of the NFL playoffs. CBS has been pumping his new television show hard during commercial breaks, so his coming to mind dovetailed nicely with my mental shitty movie prospectus. 

      The bartender at one point even said to me while Son in Law was playing, "Hey, you see Rob Schneider has a new TV show?" That sealed the deal. I hadn't said a word to anyone about my shitty movie idea. But the guy slinging drinks saw Pauly Shore up on the tube, and his thoughts led right in the same direction as mine. How this movie, a Pauly Shore/Rob Schneider shitravaganza has not already been made is beyond me.

      Now that I had my stars, I needed a plot. A fish out of water story is usually a good place to start, but it's just not shitty enough, despite how much time and effort Brendan Fraser has put into these flicks. Instead, I thought incompetent professionals would be a better fit for my dynamic duo of shittiness. Some profession that requires a good deal of brains but lends itself to ridicule. "Scientists!" popped into my head, followed by "Aliens!" It was coming together.

      Pauly Shore and Rob Schneider play a pair of scientists who work for SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the group that listens to the stars to try and detect alien transmissions. They're a couple of bumbling idiots, and their colleagues know this. That is why, instead of spending their nights listening for alien broadcasts, the two are given the day shift at the radio telescope. (Know anything about radio telescopes, and this is comedy gold.)

      Despite being in a position where they should not be able to succeed at their jobs, they find that they indeed pick up a transmission of unknown origin. Picturing the scene is easy. After a half-hour of general tomfoolery, being picked on by the other staff, and admitting that they're stuck in dead end jobs, Shore and Schneider move into caricature of serious behavior. Pressing buttons, turning dials, consulting manuals, etc. Eventually they do confirm they have discovered a transmission from another star. Now the two are international heroes.

      But, a jealous senior scientist at the telescope (Josh Brolin), who also happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Pauly Shore's love interest in the flick (a gorgeous young scientist played by Emma Stone, who is very concerned with Pauly's lack of ambition), fakes evidence that the transmission was actually a garbled reflection of KROQ-FM off of the atmosphere. 

      Now the heroes are goats. They are fired from SETI, Emma Stone leaves Pauly Shore, Rob Schneider is still single (because there's only enough room for one female lead in this dog), and the two are getting evicted from their apartment (a loft over a garage behind a house owned by Rob Schneider's promiscuous grandmother, played by Betty White). Pauly Shore suggests the two go out on the town and really party to chase away the blues. The scene transitions and the two of them are at a bar late at night, mostly empty, and a stranger sits down next to them at the bar. It's Al Pacino, dressed in a purple sharkskin suit and a silk headband. 

      Adding Pacino to the cast is a particularly brilliant move for the production. He lends credibility to the movie, and he requires no direction whatsoever. This is because Pacino needs more direction than any legendary actor working today. Without direction he turns into a screaming loony in every film he's in. But that's okay. The filmmakers here want Pacino to go all out. With any luck, Pacino will turn in the Colonel Kurtz of shitty movie performances.

      Here, I had a couple conflicting ideas to lead the film to its resolution, and they both involve how to use Al Pacino. In one idea, he's an ultra-secret government agent, sent to recruit Shore and Schneider into a grand conspiracy to study alien races. This path didn't really lead anywhere. So I decided to go with Al Pacino himself being an alien, sent to Earth to meet the two men who discovered the existence of his people. The mission is to pave the way for a meeting of the two civilizations. What better starting point than with the discoverers of such profound knowledge? 

      The two confess to being a pair of idiots, but that doesn't bother Al. He points out just how many great discoveries have been made by accident, and urges the pair to embrace their destiny. The rest of the movie is spent getting revenge on Josh Brolin, winning back Emma Stone, and restoring their reputations. End with a shot of Pauly Shore marrying Emma Stone, Rob Schneider boarding a spacecraft to travel to the stars (wearing the same outfit Richard Dreyfuss did at the end of Close Encounters), and Al Pacino deep kissing Betty White. 

      The title of this project: Out of This World.

One would think that a flood of GOP all stars would be clamoring for the nomination, but instead the field is made up mostly of tea party darlings and outright whackos. The fringe has been steering the debate since Obama took office, and it's now clear that fringe is trying to drive the GOP off a cliff. Most likely, there are two outcomes and two outcomes only. One: the GOP nominates Mitt Romney and he wins the general election. Two: the GOP nominates anyone else and Obama wins reelection. It's that simple. Watching this dance as the GOP tries to anoint anyone but Romney is like watching a study in denial. 

The GOP norm has gone so far to the right that the only candidates with the necessary ideological purity are not just unacceptable to a large percentage of Americans, they are downright frightening. 

That is why all Romney has to do to get the nomination is not fuck up. Don't say anything stupid. Stay fluid with policy proposals (charges of being a flip-flopper are easy to manage when one's opponents are so extreme). Go easy on attacking the other potential nominees. Stay focused on Obama. Don't get caught with a dead girl or a live boy. Just let the crazy people thin out the ranks on their own, then swoop in and collect the prize.

Nate Silver wrote a piece in the New York Times last week handicapping Obama's chances next year. In a nutshell, if Romney is the nominee, there needs to be significant economic improvement for the president to come out a winner, while any of the other candidates are supremely beatable. One thing about the article, it quantifies what has been intuitively obvious about the election since last spring. 

The Obama reelection campaign seems to agree, as they, through the soft money tap opened by the Citizens United case, have begun producing commercials linking Romney to the tea party. At first glance, it looks like the Obama team is trying to derail Romney before he gets the nomination. But why would they do that by strengthening his conservative credentials? It would seem such a strategy would be to Romney's benefit. So this strategy is either a huge miscalculation, or the Obama team feels a Romney nomination is inevitable no matter what they do, and are looking to poison the general public on Romney ahead of the actual two-way race. If that is their thinking, it's a hell of a gamble, but might be the only play that can be made at this early juncture. So while the GOP candidates campaign against each other, Obama is already campaigning against Romney.

Right now, the GOP nominating race is a joke. It's clogged with candidates who have no business near the Oval Office outside of a tour group. There won't be a liberal running for president next year, but thank God, there won't be a conservative, either.

"You gotta be kidding me." I agree wholeheartedly, Map to the Stars Eddie.

This time the scene shifts from New York City to, of course, Los Angeles. It's the near future, and a radical right-wing preacher (Cliff Robertson) has predicted that a powerful earthquake would destroy Los Angeles in the year 2000. Yea, verily, it came to pass. A big chunk of the Southland broke off from the continent, separated from the mainland by the newly formed San Fernando Sea. The preacher is elected president for life, and declares that all moral criminals be sent into exile on the island of Los Angeles. So, like the first film, a major United States city is now a maximum security prison. A prison with no guards inside, no order, and no escape.

Fast forward to the year 2013. Snake Plissken, who disappeared after the events in New York, has been captured and convicted of twenty-seven moral offenses, and has been sentenced to exile in Los Angeles. Once again, his timing is perfect. A few hours before, the president's daughter hijacked Air Force Three and bailed out over L.A., carrying a black box the president very much wants back. Inside is a device that controls a satellite network that can disable all electronics on the earth with an EMP pulse. Out of options, Commander Malloy of the United States Police Force (Stacy Keach) offers snake a familiar deal. Infiltrate L.A., return with the box, and walk away a free man.

By this point, a viewer will have noticed that Escape from L.A. is not so much a sequel as it is a remake. I would go farther, though, and suggest it is also a cheap parody. Escape from New York was a silly movie, but only in idea, not execution. Escape from L.A. is a mess. That campiness I mentioned above is just death for this flick. It's a bad sign when about twenty minutes into the film, Plissken is driving a laughably rendered CGI submarine past the Universal Studios shark, and it tries to bite his sub. Later on, Plissken is seen jumping a motorcycle into the back of a pickup truck (in laughably rendered CGI). Still later, a viewer is treated to Snake riding a tsunami on a surfboard down Wiltshire Blvd., then deftly leaping onto the back of a big fin Caddy (in laughably rendered CGI). Then he invades an enemy compound using a hang glider and mows down about two dozen bad guys with a machine gun (while hanging from a harness, but it still looks laughable).

Of course, it doesn't stop there. Most of the performances in Escape from L.A. contribute to the general ridiculousness of the movie. Kurt Russell plays Snake like he's auditioning for an off off off Broadway stage production of Dirty Harry the Musical. Bruce Campbell as the Surgeon General of Beverly Hills might have thought he really was doing a Joel Schumacher Batman film. Peter Fonda must have been thinking about putting an addition on his house. Pam Grier was, well, Pam Grier. And Steve Buscemi as Map to the Stars Eddie could have been replaced by Rob Schneider and no one would have noticed.

The best performance in the movie was given by Georges Corraface as bad guy Cuervo Jones, and it was because he had the decency not to overact. 

Escape from L.A. is a terrible film. The edgy filmmaker that first introduced Snake Plissken to audiences in 1981 was long gone by the time this dog was released in 1996. Looking at Carpenter's career is a study in tragedy. Sometime between Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, the man hit a wall. Escape from L.A. is the nadir of the shambles that is the second half of Carpenter's career as a director. Alien: Resurrection is the winner in this duel. 

This film gets a bad rap. Halloween and its sequel featured the silent killer Michael Myers and his constant would-be victim, Laurie Strode. By the time this third film was made, both had become horror icons, especially the masked murderer Myers. The brand association any potential viewers would have between a film with the title "Halloween" and Michael Myers was strong, so the decision to completely drop Myers, Strode, and the slasher concept for Halloween III was bound to create a backlash. It's inexplicable, honestly, that producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill expected any other reaction. The two of them were worn out on Michael Myers after the first two films. There's nothing wrong with that, and no one was putting a gun to their head and forcing them to make another Halloween film, but they were mistaken when they thought the name of their little franchise was more valuable than the characters in it. 

The film follows Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins, horror and John Carpenter veteran), a bit of a drunk and deadbeat dad, who begins investigating the murder of an emergency patient at his hospital after the patient warns upon admission that "They're going to kill us all." Who "they" are, Dr. Dan wants to find out. The murdered patient was one Harry Grimbridge (Al Berry), owner of a local shop. It's October, and part of his store display consists of Halloween masks made by Silver Shamrock Novelties. The masks are a big hit this Halloween season. All the kids in California and across the country seem to have them. Every time the annoying Silver Shamrock commercial comes on the television (which is often), there seem to be some kids nearby, masks at the ready, plopped down in front of the tube. 

After meeting with Grimbridge's daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), the two of them connect a bunch of dots and figure out that Silver Shamrock has something to do with Grimbridge's death. They travel to the rural town of Santa Mira, where the masks are made. It's a stifled little company town. Every resident seems to be in fear of the factory and its owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy). There are security cameras on every street corner (still an odd thing in 1982), and a curfew is announced every evening over loud speakers throughout the town, warning all the residents off the streets. Hmm, something strange is afoot in Santa Mira. 

It turns out that Cochran is a believer in the occult. The Halloween masks and the promotional campaign surrounding them are part of a nefarious plan to...well, it has something to do with Stonehenge and melting children's faces. There may have been gateways to the other side, that kind of thing. By the point the viewer is let in on Cochran's motives, they no longer matter. It's Mad Libs plot resolution by then. But that doesn't matter. It only remains to be seen how Dr. Dan is going to save the day and HOLY SMOKES I did not see that ending coming.

The ending, which I won't reveal here, has a gigantic plot hole regarding time zones, but is an excellent misdirect from what I was expecting. For a film that didn't have much to work with, and had long stretches of barren screen time, Wallace managed to keep me interested. I wanted to see how this film ended. I wanted Cochran to get his comeuppance and the children of the world to be saved. 

But lest I get too ahead of myself, there isn't all that much that makes Halloween III stand out. It's a relic that horror fans will find enjoyment in seeking out, but for the regular viewer, it's okay to let this one remain obscure.

Worthy of final note, though, is John Carpenter's score (since there's no Michael Myers, the iconic piano theme of the original was replaced). He's always made a habit of contributing to the score of his films in one way or another. Although he didn't direct Halloween III, he still got a producer credit, and being a Halloween film, it's got his fingerprints all over it. 

The familiar synthesized Carpenter music starts immediately with the opening credits, and it is among his better efforts. It was also a collaborative effort with Alan Howarth, who Carpenter worked with in scoring a number of his films throughout the 1980s. This score, however, is a bit more familiar than the others. 

Around the same time Halloween III was being made, Carpenter was also working on The Thing. The score for that film was composed and conducted by Ennio Morricone. The Thing's score, in many ways, was an homage to Carpenter's work as a musician, but it had more depth and complexity than anything Carpenter had done, owing to Morricone's decades long excellence scoring films. But listen to the score in Halloween III, and much of the chord progressions are lifted straight from The Thing. Either Carpenter was heavily influenced by Morricone at the time, or Carpenter did some uncredited work on The Thing. Either way, it's a neat little film mystery.

In Campbell's story, there were no women. Hawks saw fit to throw in a couple for broader appeal. They are little more than window dressing to the story.

Most of the paranoid tension of Campbell's story has been whisked away by the toned down nature of the alien, but it's hard to fault a film in 1951 turning away from a story about a shape-shifting alien and replacing it with a howling man-beast. Hell, even the 1982 production was beset with problems with creature effects, and the fact they pulled it off is a testament to their work. For that matter, the 2011 film had at its disposal CGI technology, and still laid an egg with its overwrought and overseen renditions of the alien creatures. Score another one for analog. 

But that's the end of negative criticism I have for The Thing. As far as monster fare from that era of cinema is concerned, The Thing is a classic. It has none of the campiness of a Bert I. Gordon flick, or the cheapness of a Corman film. Most of this has to do with Hawks. He was not a b-movie monster director. He was an accomplished filmmaker who ran out some of the greatest films of all time in genres ranging from film noir to westerns, comedy to classic crime. The Thing was his first foray into sci-fi/horror, and like some other successful filmmakers who took the plunge after spending their time elsewhere, he treated the material with respect and seriousness.

The cast operates as an ensemble, with Kenneth Tobey as Captain Pat Hendry taking the lead. Receiving orders from the unseen General Fogerty to fly to Polar Expedition Six near the North Pole at the request of the lead scientist on station, Dr. Carrington (brilliantly played by Robert Cornthwaite, stealing the show from Tobey), Hendry and his band of travelers discover that strange things have been afoot. The station tracked an inbound object on radar originating in outer space moving at a high rate of speed. Was it a meteor? That would be nothing new. Alas, it was not. The track of the object changed course, indicating it was a vessel operating under control of some kind, and it crashed within flying distance of the camp, hence the request for Hendry to head up with a plane and crew. 

The assembled team heads to the crash site and discovers that a craft of some kind has indeed slammed into the ice and been buried as the ice refroze around it, leading to an iconic shot in cinema as the team traces the outline of the craft under the ice in an effort to determine its shape. When it turns out to be circular, the cast, along with the viewer, know the stakes have been raised. 

      Misfortune strikes as the team accidentally destroy the craft with thermite explosives in an attempt to thaw it out, but mere steps away the team comes across the corpse of the ship's pilot embedded in the ice, covered like it's ship when it tried to crawl away from the disaster. This is it, folks—the discovery of life from another planet. One witness in particular is eager to get news of the discovery to the outside world. He is reporter Ned Scott (Douglas Spencer, in another standout performance in the film). His character comes from a more innocent time, when reporters still had easy rapport with members of the military, before telling the truth about Vietnam made them persona non grata among much of the military, but that's a different story.

Back at camp, a ludicrous misjudgment by a sleepy noncom leads to the creature being thawed from the ice and awakening, not in the best of moods. It proceeds to break through an outer wall into the Arctic night, coming across and attacking a pack of sled dogs. The dogs rip off one of its arms, and upon examination of the arm by the scientists at the station, they discover that they are dealing with animate plant matter of some kind, one that reacts positively and hungrily to warm blood.

From this point on, the film moves swiftly towards its conclusion. The monster is rarely seen, preferring to play a game of cat and mouse with the humans in the station. Sometimes it is the mouse, and sometimes it is the cat. When it decides to be the cat, more of the cast in winnowed down. Throughout all this, a debate begins to rage among the military men and the scientists. Those in uniform see nothing more than a threat to their lives, while the scientists, chief among them Dr. Carrington, see an opportunity to converse with a superior life form slipping from their grasps because of an inability to communicate or because of an escalating series of misunderstandings. The creature continues to isolate the team throughout the film, though, so Carrington's position becomes weaker as the film progresses. The film's climax is explosive and memorable, followed by a closing scene during which Scotty is finally able to send his story to the outside world, and delivers one of the most classic lines in all of sci-fi cinema. "Watch the Skies."

The Thing from Another World is a must-see for any film buff, much less a viewer who is into horror or sci-fi. The performances by the cast are quite dated, but not many films at the time were experimenting with realism in dialogue or delivery. They performed admirably, though. One aspect of the film I noted earlier was the misuse of the female characters. Glorified coffee girls, their treatment in the film grates today, but then again, so do all the n-bombs in Huck Finn. My gripe with the female characters is that they were so transparently unnecessary. They were there, but given no meaningful roles. Better to go whole hog like Campbell and Carpenter and just excise women from the story completely rather than have them contribute so little. But that's the lens of time speaking, so who knows? 

Hawks waited a long time before jumping into this genre. When he finally did, it was worth the wait. The Thing from Another World is a great film.

Last week, The Thing was released to theaters. Directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., this new Thing is a bit weird. Originally conceived as a remake of the 1982 John Carpenter film, during pre-production the film morphed into being a prequel to the Carpenter film. This was not a bad idea, as the Carpenter Thing is not only a strong film, it also had a ready-made introductory story that could be made into a full-length feature...possibly. The new Thing, however, while being clearly a prequel to anyone familiar with Carpenter's work, contains so many visual cues from Carpenter Thing that it also becomes clear the remake idea was not completely scrapped. Or maybe it's just a case of lazy filmmaking. Maybe there was a script for a remake, the concept changed, but that draft remained, was altered, and became what was finally put to film. Either way, it's the remake/prequel aspects of new Thing that make it weird. Maybe it's an homage, but if that's the case, there was a bit too much homaging going on. 

Two of the characters travel to the Norwegian camp and find it burnt, exploded, and exposed to the elements. Inside there's a corpse with some ghastly self-inflicted wounds, and in the back is a huge block of ice that once contained the thing (Carpenter's own homage to the original Thing from 1951, and round and round we go). Outside the camp, the two Americans discover the deformed, burnt remains of some creature. Later, in another day trip from the American camp, an alien spacecraft is shown to have been discovered by the Norwegians beneath the Antarctic ice. So now, instead of just a mysterious helicopter, two bearded Norwegians, and a dog to explain, there's a burnt camp, a suicide, a rather significant block of ice, a monstrous body, and a spaceship that all need to be shoehorned into a story that ENDS with a helicopter, two bearded Norwegians, and a dog. It's hard enough to write a story when subsequent events have been established, much less when events during the earlier story have been established without any need for narrative cohesion. Indeed, the lack of cohesion made them more mysterious and served Carpenter's needs better than if things had made sense. The hill new Thing's filmmakers were trying to climb just kept getting steeper and steeper.

But there's still more.

Carpenter Thing is looked upon with quite a bit of fondness by it's fans. It's the best film John Carpenter ever made, and even though it flopped when it appeared in theaters, it's aging well, getting better with every year that goes by. It's no 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, continuing with that analogy, new Thing has to compete with Carpenter Thing in the same way that 2010 had to compete with 2001, whether the filmmakers want it to or not. There is no way it could live up to what came before. The hill is now a mountain.

Finally, there's one other problem new Thing couldn't overcome: it's own ineptness. All that stuff written about above is meaningless in the face of new Thing's prevalent mediocrity. There is little to distinguish the film from any over-CGI'd monster flick of the last twenty years. There are only small flashes of the tension which should be inherent in a story about an alien chameleon. Instead, the film relies too much on the appearance of the monster, and on the film's lead, Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Set immediately before the events in Carpenter Thing, new Thing opens with the Norwegians discovering the alien spaceship mentioned above. Shift to the United States, and paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Winstead) is recruited by scientist Dr. Sander Halversen (Ulrich Thomsen) to travel to Antarctica to extract a biological specimen from the ice, something she has experience with. Secrecy abounds, and Lloyd is forced to make her decision to join Dr. Halversen without being told what she will be digging up. Of course, it's the body of the thing.

After Lloyd and the Norwegian team excavate the alien remains and return them to their camp, it awakens and bursts forth from the ice in the first bit of silliness that doomed this film. The thing goes on a murderous rampage in the camp, presumably quite surprised at its new surroundings. It's subdued and burnt by the Norwegians, and things return to normal in the camp. No more alien, no more trouble. Of course, if the plot wrapped up so quickly, there wouldn't be any movie. Now the thing's true menace is shown. It can imitate any living creature it comes in contact with. One or more of the team members at the camp is an alien, hiding, stalking, waiting and watching for its opportunity to escape the nowhere land of Antarctica. 

Lloyd picks up on this very fast, and goes from zero to paranoid in a flash. Never mind that she's right. She makes leaps in logic and deductions in subversion that would make Joe McCarthy blush. Far before things become clear, she's ready to torch anyone who so much as looks at her funny. What makes it worse is that Winstead just couldn't carry the film. The entire movie rests on her shoulders, and it does not work. The necessary gravitas is missing. 

As for the rest of the cast, they operate in ensemble, and are fairly decent. The film would have been better served by toning down Lloyd and bringing her more in tune with the rest of the characters, or dumping Winstead and her character altogether. Probably the latter, as she was miscast. 

The filmmakers attempted to stuff the middle of the film with mystery—who's the thing?—and were on to something, but abandoned it in favor of showing their CGI monster chasing the cast around the camp. Too bad. Once that happens, all the scary, and all the suspense, ends, as well. The last twenty minutes are spent shoving the pieces into place for Carpenter Thing, while still giving Lloyd a shot at an original contribution, and both efforts are sloppy.

New Thing has entered the pantheon of throwaway creature features, alongside Mimic, Leviathan, Deep Star Six, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Stan Winston was legendary in the film industry. Before he died, he won three Oscars for visual effects (Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Jurassic Park) one for makeup (Terminator 2 again), and racked up a total of six other nominations. He either led or was part of the effects and makeup teams that worked on The Thing, The Terminator, Ghoulies, Predator, Leviathan, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Interview with the Vampire, Avatar, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the man had a hell of a career turning the real into the unreal. In horror, he was a master monster maker. But, a man has to branch out, explore new opportunities. Enter Pumpkinhead.

Things begin innocently enough. A group of vacationing teenagers show up at a country store run by Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen, reliable as ever). While Ed is off running an errand, one of the teens runs over his son while riding a dirt bike, killing him. When Ed returns, he's not happy, especially since most of the group fled the scene, leaving one poor kid behind to try and explain that it was all just an accident. Ed doesn't buy it, and in his rage he seeks out a witch in the deep woods to try and resurrect his boy. She can't help him, but does offer him revenge in the form of Pumpkinhead. Once the creature is raised, the movie takes off.

Pumpkinhead is a relentless beast, pursuing and killing the teenagers one after the other. But Ed is a good man at heart, and when he sees what his anger has unleashed, he decides he has to stop it, leading to an effective ending I won't spoil here. 

Winston didn't helm a revolutionary picture, nor is it all that original. But the film's pacing is tight, it's storytelling very professional. Without interviewing them, it's impossible to know how much of this is Winston and how much credit belongs to the film's editor, Marcus Manton. Either way, they did a fine job. There isn't a wasted moment anywhere in the film.

There are a few things which keep Pumpkinhead from clawing it's way out of the depths, however. Not the least of which is an overbearing synthesizer score that just keeps going and going and going. It's cheapness at its worst. Pumpkinhead isn't the first film, nor will it be the last, to be guilty of using an awful synth soundtrack (watch a horror film from the 80s or 90s, and it's a normal part of the experience), but Pumpkinhead had a chance to rise above that dreck. Too bad.

Another problem is the lack of talent in the cast. Missile Test loves Lance Henriksen, but when he's the best actor in a film by miles, and also saddled with a leading role, there's a low ceiling on just how good said film can be. Well, I take some that back. Brian Bremer, as Bunt, one of the locals, put in a good performance. This was his debut, and he's been in nothing of note since, but he was one of the bright spots in the cast.

In the end, Pumpkinhead is too good to be considered a b-movie, but not good enough to be considered a fine film. Mediocre isn't the right word to describe it, either. For creature feature fans, though, it's a must see.