R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead- Review
What? A Tubi original? What is it? 2023? We don’t write about those anymore….
OH YES WE DO! It’s Halloween, we have to watch R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead! I’ve been dying to watch this film. I- no. Let’s just dive into R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead, a TUBI ORIGINAL.
So, for starters- this is basically a children’s movie. Back in my day this is the kind of stuff you would watch when you were 12 or 13, but definitely not 14. It’s got it’s scary moments and jump scares, but at it’s heart, it is a meant for a PG audience. It’s based off an R.L. Stine book, which was later made into an episode of the show R.L. Stines: The Haunting Hour, a children’s horror anthology series from the early 2010s. And now we get a full length take on the subject, brought to you by Tubi.
What is it about? Well some standard kids horror story- a young boy, Sam and his brother Elliot move into a new town with their mother. No dad in the picture. They go to the pumpkin patch and the kid finds a weird pumpkin and is then accosted by the creepy owner of the pumpkin farm. The kid ends up stealing the pumpkin. This is a big deal apparently, so the sheriff, who we meet earlier when he hits on Sam’s mom, shows up and there’s this whole little sequence where Sam fails to learn about taking responsibility. This leads Elliot to try and return the pumpkin himself, which leads to…him being caught in it’s clutches!!!! This is an evil pumpkin!
But not only is he caught in it’s clutches, he is wiped from the memories of everyone around him over the age of like 16. Sam and his friend Becka (who is the Sheriff’s daughter) set out to investigate and figure out how to rescue Elliot. And along the way, they’ll make unlikely allies and discover very real threats. Yad yada. You can see how it’s a strong jumping off points for a scary movie. Sam and Becka have to like go to that pumpkin farm and snoop arounds and there’s a monster there called Pumpkinhead and stuff. Yeah.
This is a pretty entertaining movie, even if it’s not some Grade A horror flick and is sort of for kids. I think it looks good for the budget it has, the script is solid, it moves well and the acting is of a quality. It’s obviously not A list stars, I think this would be closer to the middle of the alphabet, but they put on a good show. This movie has like-able characters and the performances are definitely part of that. Things are a little exaggerated, in their little campy ways, so younger audiences can easily track the motivations and just get the vibe, but it wasn’t over the top like some other films like this.
Even though it has to operate under the constraints of a younger audience, there’s still some delightful and spooky scares. The Pumpkinhead monster is reasonably intimidating and the human villains are adequately mean and evil without, obviously, being super dark. Well, for the most part. As I said, it’s kind of blotchy from the tone side of things. I did find the horror to be reasonably compelling and the lore to be pretty well told without being too much of an info dump. It’s a surprisingly patient movie once it gets going and I was impressed by the continual focus on characters even after they introduce the monster. This film makes good use of archetypes and you can more or less gauge “good guy/bad guy/comic relief” etc, right away, but this movie builds off those archetypes to subvert your expectations at critical junctures. Which kind of impressed me because there was a risk of getting too dense and complex for what this is supposed to be but I think they avoided that here.
Pumpkinhead himself is a pretty frightening villain, though he’s arguably more bark than bite and seems scarier than he actually is. He’s also a bit of a mystery, which adds to the tension. The human villain, Farmer Palmer, is a good counterweight to Pumpkinhead. He’s your classic “Cranky old guy” villain in these kind of movies, akin the old man in Monster House. And as those characters always do, there’s more to his story than meets the eye.
It’s definitely easy to watch, but I think it’s also genuinely well executed. It’s not a long film, but it’s smooth, punchy and well directed. The child actors are reasonably strong and the script doesn’t let things get off track. It’s got tension, but it’s not too heavy for most of the film. Only at the tail end of this movie do things get a little weird, but they indeed do. While I won’t spoil the film, I will say this- you can’t say the scriptwriters were lazy.
I’m keeping this short because like- I don’t really have a lot of critical analysis of this movie and I think that’s just fine. It’s a fun, spooky Halloween watch that doesn’t push you too hard, but is still a fun watch. It’s well produced and I think Tubi did a good job with this one. And obviously, it’s here just in time for Halloween.
