I lost my way a bit in August, and haven’t be able to get much of anything written. I’ve been watching horror movies, but every Friday I just seemed to get overwhelmed, and another week would go by without a review ready. I don’t think we need to go into any deep dive about why this is the case, but I’m hoping that the doldrums have passed, and I can get back to sharing my love of horror movies with you folks.
In an effort to make up for the drought, and to get primed for Halloween season, I’m gonna try and do some double features for the month of September. The goal is to have some sort of theme to tie the films together. Keep your fingers crossed.
This first themed set is the rather generic “Late Eighties Horror.” Or perhaps “Late Eighties Horror That Deals with Grief.” I didn’t even intend for this to be a theme; I just found myself in a nostalgic mood and Tubi obliged by offering up some classic 80s horror that scratched that particular itch. It’s been easily a decade since I saw either of these films, and I found myself enjoying both more than I expected.
My fondness for 80s horror is probably rooted in the fact that it’s the decade I first really noticed and started to seek out horror movies. I’d seen a ton of older, classic horror movies on cable, but they rarely showed the films that I read about in my friend John’s copies of Fangoria magazine. The advent of the VHS rental store meant I could finally choose what I wanted to watch, though the heyday of 80s horror output was already waning by that time.
I watched a lot of great horror movies for the first time in the 80s, and a lot of forgettable dreck, but I also watched a lot of stuff that wasn’t necessarily either end of the spectrum. Movies that had a great monster, or a great idea, that were often let down by the budget or the script. Things like The Keep, or Razorback, or CHUD. While I always loved the truly great films, I think part of me kept coming back and renting new stuff hoping to hit some weird gem, like Dead & Buried or Bad Taste.
Gems like the movies we’re looking at this week.
The Medium(s)
I watched both The Gate and Pumpkinhead on Tubi. The Gate is available for free on Kanopy, CW and Hoopla, free with ads on Fandango and Plex (and Tubi) and for subs on Amazon Prime. Pumpkinhead is available for subs on AMC+ and Philo and for free with ads on Tubi. They can both be purchased at the usual online vendors.
The Gate was released on Blu-ray by Lionsgate (via their Vestron Video label) in 2017, with a bunch of extras (a more recent Walmart exclusive has the same content with sturdier packaging.) Pumpkinhead was originally released on Blu-ray by Shout Factory in 2014, but a 2023 4k release looks to be the better option.
The Gate
“You mean you guys were serious about that demon stuff?”
No, this isn’t the Johnny Depp one, that’s The Ninth Gate. This is the one with Stephen Dorff, from 1987.
I didn’t think I was going to enjoy this. It’s such a kids movie in a lot of ways. It has the typical latchkey setup of a lot of 80s movies, with absent parents, a geeky friend and an adolescent older sibling. It feels a lot like the Goonies or Monster Squad. With a much smaller budget.
As the movie went along, I kinda got sucked into it, though. I made allowances for the child actors (and it was nice to see teenagers played by teenagers instead of twenty-somethings) and settled in for what I expected (from shots of the minions) to be a Ghoulies sort of thing. A rubber-monster horror comedy.
What I got instead was surprisingly sweet horror movie about love, friendship and family in the face of, well, Hell. Yeah, the clay-motion minions are fun and kinda funny, but the filmmakers take some things seriously. There’s the zombie that breaks through the wall and grabs one of the protagonists, late in the film, and that zombie makeup is REALLY good and effective. Then another character stabs out a kid’s eye with a Barbie doll in a pretty gory shot. And after being touched by the Big Bad, the main character finds an eyeball in his HAND, which he gouges out with a shard of glass.
Not your typical kid movie, then.
The story follows Glen (a very young Stephen Dorff), a young suburban kid with a fondness for model rocketry. When the tree in his backyard is taken down following a lightning strike, he and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) unearth a huge hole while looking for geodes where the tree used to be. Some blood, a broken geode and a weird party trick later and things start getting decidedly strange.
Terry is convinced the hole is some kind of gateway to hell – at least according to the liner notes of his favorite heavy metal album. They try a ritual to close the hole, but unfortunately there has already been a sacrifice – Glen’s beloved dog was unceremoniously buried in the hole by one of his sister’s friends earlier.
Cue stop-motion monsters, demonic arms under beds, moths breaking windows and general horrific events.
The effects are quite good – I particularly liked the streaming smoke from the ‘gate’ flowing up into a darkening sky. The monsters are well designed and effective. I always thought the little “gremlins” were stop motion, but they’re usually actors in suits working on giant sets. The moments of gore are few, but all the more shocking because of that.
There are plot holes aplenty, and the script often requires the actors to simply do the stupidest thing, but the film moves fast enough with enough energy that you hardly notice. There’s a thread throughout the film about loss, and the fear of loss, that I hadn’t noticed before. Terry’s mother has recently died, and the creatures of the gate are not above using her likeness to try and trick him. It’s a touching moment, even if the film barely gives it any time. Glen and his sister are also struggling, with Glen still dependent on (and afraid of losing) his parents, and his sister (Christa Denton) just as determined to handle things on her own.
Glen’s fondness for rockets (something he shares with his sister) is, of course, key to defeating the monsters. Parents must have loved this. “But Moooom! If I don’t have a model rocket, how can we defend against the forces of hell?”
The Bottom Line
It’s goofy. It’s schmaltzy. It has some awesome 80s hair and fashions. And yet I liked The Gate. It had likeable characters, good special effects, an okay story, and was well made. There were definitely worse ‘horror’ movies made in the 80s, and it makes me miss the days when it was okay to aim a horror movie squarely at kids. I loved that stuff, and I turned out okay. Mostly.
Pumpkinhead
“What did ya think, it’d be easy? Neat and clean and painless? You’re a fool.”
When a group of teenagers kills the young son of store owner Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen), he makes a deal with a witch to raise a demon to exact revenge on the teens. That sounds both dumb as a post and just the kind of movie you’d run across in an 80s video store. I remember renting it thinking that the story sounded like a whole bunch of other movies, but that with Stan Winston involved at least the monster would be cool. I also remember being disappointed the first time I saw it – at least in part because it took so long for the monster to show up and start, you know, monstering.
The thing is, Pumpkinhead is actually pretty good – especially coming at the time it did, at the ass-end of the 80s slasher boom and just before the 90s horror desert. It’s a film that has two secret weapons – one is that monster design by Stan Winston (who also directed the film) and the other is Lance Henriksen.
Henriksen is the heart and soul of Pumpkinhead. While Winston does fine in his feature film debut (as far as I know he made only one other full-length film), it’s Henricksen that makes everything work. I believe every line he says. I believe his agony and rage at the death of his child would absolutely lead him to make a deal with the devil. I believe in his grief, and I believe, later, in his remorse. Everyone else in the film knows they’re in a monster movie, but Lance Henriksen acts like this is the deepest drama he’s ever been fortunate enough to play a part in. He’s goddamn incandescent.
As a result, every time Ed Harley is on screen the film punches way above its weight class. None of the other actors even come close, though I do like the old witch (Florence Schauffler), and little Billy Harley (Matthew Hurley) is perhaps one of the cutest kids to ever grace the screen. I could care less about any of the other protagonists, even the “final girl,” Tracey (Cynthia Bain).
Pumpkinhead himself (itself?) is a great monster, though, and while not as great as Henriksen, it is damned entertaining. From the moment Harley (and I keep wanting to write out his full name, ED Harley, because I hear it in the witch’s voice) digs up the demon in an old, pumpkin filled graveyard, the monster looks and feels unique. The demon is connected to Harley, and as the film progresses and the creature comes closer and closer to accomplishing Harley’s vengeance, their appearances begin to more closely resemble the other.
Unlike The Gate, which only touched upon deeper themes, Pumpkinhead delves deeply into the costs of grief and vengeance. It’s not subtle; it’s not even particularly well written, but it’s effective and affecting, and I ended up kinda loving the film by the end (where a wizened Ed Harley takes Pumpkinhead’s place in the graveyard).
The Bottom Line
There’s a depth of emotion to Pumpkinhead that I didn’t really appreciate when I first saw it, and it also works as a great little monster film. (That moment when the monster moves past the kitchen windows was so good I had to rewind and watch it again.) If you’re looking for just that, you may have to have some patience to get through the initial third, before things start getting monstery. For my money, though, it’s Lance Henriksen that makes this movie great, and his performance is so intense and fiery you can almost feel him burning off the screen.
The Bottom Bottom Line
Two enjoyable 80s horror movies that reminded me why I like this decade so much for horror. They aren’t top tier filmmaking, and there are plenty of things to nitpick about them, if you care to, but they’re also energetic and entertaining movies with plenty to enjoy for any horror fan. I think Pumpkinhead is the better film, if only because The Gate doesn’t have Lance Henriksen in it, but they’re both worth a watch or two.