Double Feature Friday Fright Night!

I've decided to try a new strategy for my blog.  Friday Night Double Features!  Because... well, I have no social life and I need something to do.  Yea.

Tonight we have a lot of alliteration going on, Double Feature Friday Fright Night!  In honor of Friday the 13th, the second of our feature films reviews is Friday the 13th, part VII: The New Blood!  And the first is Pumpkinhead!  Because, come on, you can never have too many pumpkin-headed vengeance demons.  You just can't.  They're like boobs.

Both movies came out in 1988, strangely enough.  I was 18 years old then.  Graduating High School.  Starting College.  And they didn't even have the internet back then, so god only knows what I spent my time doing.  I may have actually gone outside once or twice.  Hmmm.

Let's review Pumpkinhead!  First, a summary!  It's really a decent horror movie, and I know you've probably seen it before, unless you've been living under a rock.  Under a van.  Down under the bridge by the river.

Pumpkinhead begins with some spooky nighttime hijinks, but the real story starts with a man and his son in their kitchen, getting ready for their day selling produce.  The man's a farmer, and his son's a bit nearsighted, but they are all they have left of their family after the boy's mother passed away.  So they head to their produce store and start readying the veggies.  Cue the city folk, coming by on the way to their cabin in the woods (and why is it always a cabin in the woods?), who stop at the produce stand to buy some general goods.  Here we found out, from some visiting country bumpkins and their grandpa, that the legend of Pumpkinhead is already well and established in the local region.  Pumpkinhead, according to the children, is all about taking vengeance on bad folks.  Are you getting the feeling that there's about to be a need for some vengeance?  Yea, me too.  So the country bumpkins move along, and the city folk break out their dirtbikes for some free-wheelin fun along the hilly roadside.  The farmer heads back to his house to fetch some feed he forgot to bring, leaving his boy and his dog alone to mind the store.  The dogs run outside to go after the dirtbikes, and the boy runs after his dog, who nearly gets run over by the city-folk on their god-DAMN noisy dirtbikes.  Unfortunately, while the dog lives...  the boy isn't so lucky.  Having come to the conclusion that you can't have a horror movie without some really bad decisions along the way, the city folk decide to make a run for it, hoping nobody will notice the broken down boy and the pool of blood.  See, the guy who ran the boy over, just did the same thing to a girl a few months ago, and he's still on probation!  So if they find out he was stone drunk and ran over someone else, well, they'll... at least give him a ticket, or something.  Seriously, if you've run over someone while drunk, twice, in a few months period, I think it's time for an intervention, or rehab, or something.  So the city folk flee to their cabin, several of whom are just trying to find a phone to call an ambulance, and the guy who ran over the boy, continuing his string of bad decisions, holds the rest of the people hostage so they can't call anybody and get him in trouble.  Cue the farmer coming home, and finding his dying boy, and getting all kinds of pissed off.  The farmer's heard tell of a woman, an old, old woman, who has...  powers.  Turns out she can't do nothing for his boy, but she can offer him what he wants second most.  Revenge!  In the form of a big pumpkin-headed vengeance demon.

Thank god for old women with powers, ain't it?  If not for them, who'd take care of all the pumpkin-headed vengeance demons in the world?  Few cool things to take note of in this film.  First, Lance Henrikson plays the farmer.  Interesting story about Lance, when he first started acting, they told him he was too baby-faced for the parts he wanted to play.  So, he took some time off, and went sailing.  For, like a year or something.  The sun and wind weathered his face to the consistency of old leather, and BAM!  He's famous.  Fun fact of the day, he likes making pottery in his spare time, and has sworn off making Bigfoot movies for the foreseeable future.

Also in this movie, playing the grandfatherly country bumpkin, is Buck Flower!  I can't get enough of George "Buck" Flower.  The guy sounds like he'd be a total wuss, doesn't he?  I mean, George Flower?  I admit he's never exactly played action hero roles, but he seems pretty damn tough in most of the movies he's been in.  He was in Escape from New York, for crying out loud, with Ernest Borgnine, Adrienne Barbeau, Kurt Russell and Lee Van Cleef.  I'm pretty sure just appearing in that movie makes one a badass.  There's guys out there reading this blog right now, going "Yep.  I was just an extra in that movie, but since then I've started my own chapter of the Hell's Angels!"  See?  Told you.

I also like the graveyard the old woman sends him to, is actually a pumpkin field.  I didn't notice it the first time I saw this movie, but it is.  The vines are all...  uh.. viney...  in that...  creepy way that...  vines are...  viney.  And the pumpkins are all warped and half-squashed like they been laying there since last summer.  Which is creepy in that...  way that...  warped pumpkins are....  creepy.  Yea.  Pretty sure I reviewed this movie before, but come on now.  Every movie is reviewed dozens of times by different critics!  I've just reviewed the really good movies, more than once!  Yea.

Funny thing about this movie, it occurs to me that, if the farmer hadn't forgot the bag of seed in the first place, he'd never have left to get it, and the boy wouldn't have been on his own, and the whole movie probably wouldn't have happened.  Spooky, innit?  The way blind fate has a hand in everything?  Take our next movie, for instance.

The Friday the 13th series of movies is probably the most successful horror movie franchise of all time.  I know, you are arguing the Halloween series is actually more successful, but have they made over ten Halloween movies?  No.  No they haven't.  They have made over 10 Friday the 13th films, from the original back in 1980, to Jason X, to the recent remake that, well, probably wrecked the series for how badly it was done, and doesn't bode well for more sequels, but oh well!  Shit happens, as they say.

Friday the 13th, part VII: The New Blood was made in 1988.  Amazing that they made a movie a year for 8 years on that same series, innit?  This movie occurs after part 6, where Tommy Jarvis (the only OTHER recurring character in the entire Friday the 13th series besides Jason Vorhees) secures the undead corpse of Jason Vorhees in Crystal Lake, where Jason originally drowned.  Tommy almost drowned at the end of that movie, and I presume, lived happily ever after with the sheriff's smoking hot daughter, because he never shows up again in any of the sequels.  Interesting fun fact about Tommy jarvis from part 6, the actor who plays him is the same actor who was in Return of the Living Dead, playing Freddy, the poor sap who dies on the first day of his new job by inhaling the Trioxin 1-4-5 (or whatever it was called) and pretty much ruins the July 4th holiday for the entire town.  Interesting fun fact, the actor, named Thom Mathews, is actually a good friend of George Clooney, who he hung out with when they were both struggling actors.  Wouldn't THAT have made a weird Return of the Living Dead?  With George Clooney in it?  Interesting George Clooney fun fact, he was the same bit-part-actor who played in Return of the Killer Tomatoes before scoring his breakout role in From Dusk Til Dawn. After that, he was starring in films with the likes of Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer.  But enough fun facts!  On with the summary!

Camp Crystal lake, by the time part 7 rolls around, has become a little-used retreat for summer vacationers.  Our heroine, a teen girl by the name of Tina Shephard, lost her father in the lake a long time ago.  Brought back to the cabin her family owns by her psychiatrist, Tina's memories of that time resurface...  which is exactly what her psychiatrist wants.  You see, Tina is a powerful Telekinetic whose powers only pop out when she's under extreme stress.  So how do you get evidence of those powers on tape and make yourself a fortune?  By putting her under stress, of course!  So it's back to Crystal Lake for Tina, to the lake where her father drowned.  Sadly, Tina's uncontrolled powers accidentally caused the death of her father when Tina was little, and Tina now has some vague recollection of that.  But, missing her father as badly as she does, Tina tries to wake him with those same powers...  and accidentally frees Jason Vorhees from his watery tomb!  Jason, freed from his prison, starts killing everyone around the lake, and Tina, gradually gaining some small semblance of control of her powers, faces him down in a head-on battle for survival.  Can even Jason Vorhees triumph against the incredible power of the human mind, or will the goody two shoes Tina Shephard conquer Jason with the power of her will?  And even more important, will Terry Kiser, who plays the psychiatrist, ever star in Weekend at Bernie's 3?

I don't have any fun facts about this movie, but it was fun to watch an undead Jason getting goddamn PISSED at some silly teenage girl beating the CRAP out of him with her psychic powers.  He gets so MAD!  lol  Of course, if someone hung me and lit me on fire, I'd get a little peeved about it, myself.

Friday the 13th, part 7, is currently the ONLY Friday the 13th movie you can find on netflix, and Pumpkinhead was just showing on El Rey.  Watch them, both movies are pretty decent, even if the 7th Friday the 13th movie was not as good as some of the other ones.  Of course, it was better than some.  And there's boobs!  There are no boobs in Pumpkinhead.  Unless you count the guy that ran over the kid on his dirtbike while drunk.  He's a boob.

That's it for this Friday the 13th!  I'm off to have some Mint Chip Ice cream.  :-D