He built a career around unforgettable baddies, and so his first crack at directing one of those baddies in a world of his own design with total creative control must kick ass. They’ve become household names thanks to his insanely creative (and often insanely disturbing) creature effects, as in he gave cinematic birth to Terminator and Sarris. If ya’ll hillbilly yokels don’t know about Winston, here’s some knowledge: The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Lake Placid and even Galaxy Guest all owe him a debt. Not long after Halloween this year - some two decades after I first saw the Pumpkinhead - I finally tracked down the unedited version of Stan Winston’s debut directorial effort. There was also a flamethrower and a shotgun and dirt bikes, and it didn’t even seem like censors had to edit too many of the good parts out. The creature was cool, the voodoo witch was creepy and plenty of teenagers got killed. and watched it, commercials and all, on a rainy summer morning when there was nothing else to do. I first saw Pumpkinhead in neutered, safe-for-TV mode when I was about 9 or 10 years old. Nope, when uttered by anyone but Henriksen, the plea for an old woman who “has such as powers” is just about the cheesiest thing this side of a hell-spawn Satan beast with a pumpkin face. You don’t even have to say it as Cletus, although that would be the obvious choice. Nick, or one of Fat Tony’s henchmen - and they sound just as hackneyed as they should. You see, Ed Harley’s son was killed just moments earlier by a gaggle of city slickers on dirt bikes, and as any good hillbilly knows, the one way to mourn AND avenge the death of your only child is to find the neighborhood voodoo witch.īut say the lines as a character from The Simpsons - any character, it doesn’t matter, maybe Dr. Some folks’d say she has such as powers.”Īs played by cult icon Lance Henriksen, those three lines of dialogue are injected with more soul and raw emotion than they deserve. “She lives somewhere in the mountains hereabouts.

“I’m looking for an old woman,” Ed Harley tells a fellow Appalachian hillbilly.

Ed Harley compresses everything that’s wonderful and painful about the film into a few words. There’s a scene exactly halfway through Pumpkinhead, the 1988 creature feature directed by FX legend Stan Winston, when Mr. Now it begins.” Can my one memory of Pumpkinhead live up to the nostalgia, or is this long-forgotten creature feature cheesier than an Appalachian witch?

Fairy tail pumpkin head guy