Happy Happy Halloween

Today might be a good day to give Halloween III another chance.

It's tough to tell whether there's a small movement to support it or whether I just have a couple friends who like it - the 3.5 IMDb rating would indicate the latter, and last year I was voted down at my own party for suggesting it, but I bump into fellow fans from time to time.

There's a good chance you'll remember in the first 20 minutes why you thought it was bad, or at least why others do, but you will take at least three things away from it, and that's two and a half more than you'll take away from Halloween: H20.

1. Tom Atkins is a gamer, and never let quality of a script dictate the quality of his performance.
2. The terrific set piece where we see what the masks are for.
3. The jingle. Yes, it's just a sort of electro London Bridge, but this diabolical trick and treat will haunt you for at least one day of almost every October for the rest of your life.

What would have happened if it had been a hit? The end of slasher sequeldom? Anthologic franchises instead of repetitive? That's what John Carpenter and Debra Hill had in mind. But Halloween III: Season of the Witch made $14 million, and Friday the 13th Part 3 made $36 the same season, and we found out what audiences wanted from their mask movies and what they did not.



Happy Halloween everybody!

...

Your indulgence for a few days, as hosting evacuated relatives makes blogging duties implausible. Back to normal soon. In meantime, watch horror movies.

Play time

This time of year, all the long-running 1980s horror series are front and center, or at least I spend too much time in retailers where copies of the usual suspects are sale priced and prominently placed for my attention. For $6.99 or so I get my pick of Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Children of the Corn, and their many sequels.

None of these grew from as poor an initial entry as another mainstay, Child's Play, which is up to five complete films beginning with the unscary, unfunny first flick in 1988. The script is by Don Mancini, an unusual case: his feature film catalog includes six scripts, a debut (Cellar Dweller, which I will be watching as soon as a torrent pops up) and the entire Child's Play series. That's it in total, and it seems like a small triumph for anyone who's nurtured a pet project for years that Mancini got to make his directorial debut on the oddly autobiographical Seed of Chucky.

After the successful first two, the third installment tanked commercially and critically, due in part to a 1991 release date less than nine months after Child's Play 2.

Chucky stayed chopped up for years, stitched together again in 1998 with Ronny Yu's comic, self-referential re-take, Bride of Chucky, which did well enough to justify Seed of Chucky in 2004. Don Mancini, taking over the reins at last, brought the series even farther out into left field with Seed: John Waters, a Britney Spears impersonator, a gender-confused puppet called Glen/Glenda, you get the idea.

Series producer (and credited creator of the Chucky doll) David Kirschner has confirmed a Child's Play remake in the works. No real details, but the plan is to work from something closely resembling the original script and make it scarier. Brad Dourif suggested in an interview on the set of Halloween that the next Child's Play would be called Chucky Goes Nuts and that Mancini would again handle directorial duties, but the remake would scrap that slightly promising angle.

As mentioned, the first film was 1988 - so expect a 20th anniversary DVD rerelease early next year, maybe a third DVD box set.

Do not expect much on Chuckwick from the Chucky-obsessed Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir. From a 2005 interview:

KIRK CHRISTIANSEN: Speaking of labels, I heard about your label Dollars-N-Cents. I heard you were planning on doing some DVDs and independent projects on the side. What do you have in mind?

BUSHWICK BILL: I'm getting ready to do a movie based on the Chucky [series]. It's gonna be called Chuckwick. It's like Bushwick and Chucky. It's like twin brothers and I try to warn him of the problems of getting too involved with the character. It's an independent director.

KC: Oh, it's not the original Chucky director. Did you ever talk to that guy?

BUSHWICK: Nah, if I did do it with him, it would be cool. I was supposed to meet him when he was working on part two. But there was some discrepancies with how I was supposed to get paid. The people working at the time didn't understand that until you're an established actor, you can't demand a certain amount of money. So, he was gonna get it done in '93, but I guess the demand for money was too high. He wanted to do the Mind Tricks movie and Chucky, but back then no one understood Hollywood or how you get paid so they didn't understand what was going on.

Don't sweat it, Bushwick, no one understands Hollywood now either.

Dating Sisters

Douglas Buck's Sisters remake (mentioned a bit ago here) starring Lou Doillon, Stephen Rea, and Chloë Sevigny has been listed by Image Entertainment for a March 11, 2008 DVD release.

Bloodsucker Tales

It writes itself: all you do is happen to watch some Northern Exposure, or a National Geographic special, or catch a showing of Christopher Nolan's Insomnia (or rent Erik Skjoldbjærg's original), and then you say to yourself, man, imagine if one of those places where it's dark for a month had vampires show up? And so [conjecture] Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith published the three-issue comic 30 Days of Night in 2002. The dialogue is no great shakes, and it doesn't exactly scream originality, but the atmospheric art and why-didn't-I-think-of-that simplicity of the premise, combined with the quickness of the thing, make for an easy and enjoyable enough read.

The comic hit big, launching the careers of Niles (now a top name in horror comics) and Templesmith. Eighteen hundred days of night later, we have eight more miniseries and a couple annuals, a line of novels in the works (the first one, Rumors of the Undead, is published) and the movie hitting screens today, directed by David Slade (of the well-put-together Hard Candy).

30 Days was made for a sizeable $50 million, but it'll take first place at the box office this weekend; if it tops $20 mil, expect a tentative greenlight for the the sequel, Dark Days. Melissa George and Ben Foster both sound willing to reprise their roles; no word from Josh Hartnett. Since the source material is ready to go, it should be an easy matter to find a writer - possibly Steve Niles himself, who seems humble in interviews and just excited to be part of the whole thing. Niles took a pass at the script for 30 Days, and while it was subsequently handed around to a few more writers, much of his draft (particularly since he included a fair bit of his own dialogue from the comic) remained.

In spin-off/prequel/marketing news, the production company (Sam Raimi's Ghost House) must have felt there was source material to spare (though Blood Trails doesn't directly correspond to any of the comic miniseries) and shot seven short episodes of content, just over half an hour's worth, to lead fans up to the release date. The task fell to Víctor García, mentioned earlier this week for his work on Return to House on Haunted Hill. If you're in need of a pre-theatrical vampire fix, they can be seen free at Fearnet.

First Things first

Immediate priority goes to news on this blog's namesake, even when the news is small: Universal's planned prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing is moving forward, though descriptions may indicate a remake rather than a prequel. Strike Entertainment is in charge, and with the excellent Dawn of the Dead remake and Slither to their credit, some hope may be held out.

David Foster is on hand as executive producer; Foster produced the 1982 Thing, so presumably he'll keep a particularly faithful eye out. Foster refers to this new incarnation as "a companion piece," rather than specifying prequel or remake. Signed on to script is Ronald D. Moore, no stranger to alien intelligence. Moore's written extensively for Star Trek (Voyager, Deep Space Nine, The Next Generation, and films), Roswell, and the well-respected Battlestar Galactica relaunch, which enjoys a stellar reputation for its intelligent writing.

More news as it breaks.

Hill people

If you're among the bold videophiles enjoying movies in the maximum possible crispness with a Blu-Ray or HD DVD player, then you can be among the lucky minority experiencing Return to House on Haunted Hill today in its full intended glory.

While the movie hits stores in regular and both hi-def formats, only the Blu-Ray and HD versions contain "Navigational Cinema," allowing you to choose the direction of the action from numerous branching points in a reported 96 different ways, a more developed version of the Final Destination 3 pick-a-path gimmick.

Gimmickry of this sort is easily and perhaps rightly criticized, but this is the perfect place for it. Return to House on Haunted Hill loosely continues the story from 1999's House on Haunted Hill, William Malone's agreeably goofy, interestingly cast updating of the 1959 original. That flick was a hit for William Castle, and if anyone was ever more interested in creating an enjoyable, interactive experience for the audience than in adhering to usual rules of narrative, it was Castle, and I think he'd be pleased to check out choose-your-adventure cinema, if he weren't too busy shaking his head sorrowfully at $1000 Blu-Ray pixel-clarity home-theater setups to pay any attention.

After seeing Malone's horrible followup Fear Dot Com, I began to wonder if maybe Malone wasn't saved on House by a cast (Geoffrey Rush as a character named Price, Famke Janssen, Taye Diggs, Peter Gallagher, Jeffrey Combs as a mad doc) who were in on the idea of House in a way Malone wasn't.

Return to House on Haunted Hill doesn't boast the same pedigree, and while Malone is absent (Víctor García makes his feature debut, with three more horror flicks in the works), I'm not convinced Amanda Righetti, Erik Palladino, and Cerina Vincent can bring a sense of fun to Return. At least Jeffrey Combs is back.

Monday the 15th

A few supplemental notes on the Friday the 13th reboot.

First, the remake may or may not mean there's no Freddy Vs. Jason 2. After Freddy Vs. Jason hit big in 2003 (budget $25 mil, $115 mil worldwide take), the usual wheels spun up. It seemed like mostly the dopey sort of talk that pervades IMDb message boards - and, in fact, the type of Superman-vs-Flash nerd argument that's been around for decades. Fans speculated, as they have a habit of doing, about the other heavy hitters (and some lightweights) in horror iconography: Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Leatherface? Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Michael? Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Chucky?

Soon, more fully formed rumors began appearing in semi-legit arenas. In 2004, New Line went looking into the rights for Ash, the role that made Bruce Campbell a cult hero in the Evil Dead trilogy. It seemed possible, but contingent on a few criteria. There was (and has been, and always shall be) talk of an Evil Dead remake/sequel/revival, which would be good for the visibility of both franchises, but complicated as far as buying rights. Sam Raimi certainly didn't need the money, and there was no reason to assume he'd sell off the rights to Ash to see him wasted in a pointless fan-service free-for-all.

A treatment turned up on the internet in 2005 (it didn't do much for me, but you can find it here). Ronny Yu, director of Freddy Vs. Jason, mentioned as recently as 2006 (doing press for Fearless) that New Line had been talking about a sequel. All this aside, Freddy Vs. Jason Vs. Ash should remain in limbo for some time. The exception: a 6-issue miniseries from Wildstorm Comics, to arrive next month.

The Freddy Vs. Jason spinoff franchise has partial roots in comics: a rather silly Jason vs Leatherface three-issue miniseries, released in 1995 by the tie-in-happy, short-lived Topps comics imprint.

One more thing: no news on Crystal Lake Chronicles. Talk dates back to around 2004 on the proposed TV series set in Jason's stomping grounds of Crystal Lake and would depict the lives of the still-living young folks in the town. Rather than a slasher TV show, it would be a teen drama, a sort of horror Smallville, with Jason's legend prominent rather than Jason himself.

The idea was pitched by Geoff Garrett, assistant producer of Jason X, and Dan Farrands, writer of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (the sixth in the series). Friday head honcho Sean Cunningham signed on, but the series has been in limbo for years. Look for talks to start up again (but not for the series to get made) when the Friday reboot makes healthy money in 2009.

Dodecaphobia

Friday the 12th is as close to topical timing as I can expect to get for this news. It's been covered widely, but after Rob Zombie's new Halloween did healthily at the box office - budgeted about $15 million, doubled that on open weekend, doubled that in U.S. gross to date - the equivalent reboot of the Friday the 13th series is back in high gear.

The flick's been on and off for a few years. Round about 2005, Quentin Tarantino was mentioned as a likely choice to start the franchise over; in March of that year, he denied those rumors.

Reports in early 2006 claimed it was back in the works. This was mostly due to some fortuitous scheduling: October 13th would fall on a Friday. The production was still in early stages, and by the time the reports gained momentum, it became clear that the film would have to be scripted/finalized, cast, shot, edited, and advertised in a few short months.

October 2006, around that previously projected release date: during press for Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, producer Andrew Form claimed that Friday the 13th was in a rights battle, and should be out July 2007.

September 2007: new writers brought on. A previous draft had been done by Mark Wheaton, writer of the derivative The Messengers (half Grudge, half Cold Creek Manor). New writers are Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, responsible for the sufficiently entertaining Freddy vs. Jason crossover. We can only hope that the new track means Jonathan Liebesman (TCM: The Beginning) will no longer be involved.

Love Birds

Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes company exists, so far, to update. Of its four films, three (Amityville Horror, The Hitcher, Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are remakes, and the fourth (Texas Chainsaw: The Beginning) is a prequel to a remake. Platinum Dunes does have original properties in the pipeline, but the remakes will keep coming.

In 2009 or so, Platinum Dunes will bring forth The Birds, a new take on Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 nature-amok thriller. There are plenty of places to read about The Birds, so I'll skip that in favor of the remake angle.

For instance, this conversation between Michael Bay and Scarlet Johansson on a 2005 press junket for The Island - itself, of course, an unauthorized (and eventually sued for plagiarism; the case settled out of court for an undisclosed seven figures) remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror:

BAY (to inquisitive reporter): I don't want to talk about The Birds, because that's so far down the line, and I have misgivings about even trying to even do that, you know what I'm saying?
JOHANSSON: You're remaking The Birds? The one with Tippi Hedren?
BAY: You can't believe everything you read. It doesn't mean it's going to happen.
JOHANSSON: You can't remake a Hitchcock movie!
BAY: I know, it doesn't feel right. That's why you can't believe everything you read.

Almost everything else I would hope to say - Tippi Hedren's on-set abuse, the certainty of Bay employing a raft of computerized birds, a brief mention of Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake - is encapsulated in an interview Hedren gave to The Daily Telegraph around the same time. While Hedren may protest too much on Hitch's behalf, she does provide a delightful batch of rancor and some choice quotations.*

Current gossip is that Naomi Watts would take over Hedren's role. No director is attached yet, but numerous writers: besides Daphne Du Maurier for her original story, Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson, who collaborated on sequels Hellraiser: Inferno and Urban Legend: Final Cut, and Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, both of whom it took to write Boogeyman.

*"It's appalling, I find it so offensive."

Escape!

Not that Len Wiseman (the Underworld flicks, Die Hard 4.0) is the most talented director available, but word is that he's off the remake of John Carpenter's Escape From New York, to be replaced by Brett Ratner. There's a bit more to say about the flick, but with the current flux, I'll hold off, pending changes, in favor of explaining why this bodes ill. Ratner is responsible for the Rush Hour trilogy, and is widely hated for the third X-Men, a flick so bad I swore off going to the movies for the rest of the summer of 2006.

The LA Weekly's Scott Foundas is an intelligent fellow, and it was with curiosity that I read Foundas' "Brett Ratner, The Popcorn King" in early August, wondering if I had misjudged.

Foundas defends Ratner as a director of the people, neglecting the basic crumminess of his catalog. He hails Ratner as a paragon of populist entertainment, a who-needs-critics type of director with no interest in film but a natural talent for movies, for making people happy and taking in money hand over fist while doing so, citing Ratner's over-a-billion-dollars total box office intake. In reality, Ratner has some slight name recognition, but nothing like Foundas claims; he clearly runs in circles with people who'd recognize Ratner on a street corner.

An impromptu poll reveals that 33% of people (sample size three) recognize the name but can't quite place it. In Los Angeles circles, he does have better-than-average name recognition, some of it due to an apparent propensity for philandering and some of it due to the nastiness directed his way, with absolute justification, on the internet. I'm not sure why non-movie-people are even semi-aware who Ratner is, nor why a sane man like Scott Foundas would think there's anything worth defending about him, let alone big upping him for his box office billion and natural talent for accent jokes. Ratner's oeuvre simply isn't that exciting: Money Talks, Rush Hour 1-3, The Family Man, After the Sunset, Red Dragon, and X-Men 3. Of these, Money Talks and Rush Hour can be considered Ratner's financial successes; the Rush Hour sequels, Red Dragon, and X-Men box office grosses were based more on the properties than on any directorial ability. The Family Man made a little profit, but not too much; After the Sunset flopped. No film among these is particularly worth watching.

I would like to propose that we hear no more of Brett Ratner, Popcorn King. From this point on, all references to Ratner, and all potential directorial jobs, will be redirected to Gore Verbinski, who compares favorably to Ratner at every step of the way. Like Ratner, Verbinski started in music videos and commercials on his way to Mouse Hunt, a debut even more profitable than Money Talks. Ratner's Nicolas Cage family drama The Family Man offered a predictable It's A Wonderful Life angle; Verbinski's Nicolas Cage family drama The Weather Man looks equally usual at first, but takes a more difficult path, offering at least a few moments of interest; of the two, The Weather Man is the one to watch.

Next up, each director's foray into horror. Where Ratner went with the assured profitability of Red Dragon, the next installment in the financially reliable Hannibal Lecter series, Verbinski took on Ringu, a scary Japanese cisterns 'n sea demons story. If the script's removal of certain aspects likely to prove user-unfriendly to American audiences (see aforementioned sea demons) left some sizeable plot and motivation gaps, Verbinski's pale, dreamy approach held it all together; the film's most memorable, unapologetically unexplained sequence doesn't appear in Hideo Nakata's original. The Ring was a huge international hit and kicked off a movement still very much in progress, with execs regularly raiding Asian horror rosters for remakeable titles.

Finally, their successful trilogies. Say what you will about the poorly acclaimed third chapters (both blocked from screening in China, by the way), but Verbinski's trilogy, as wildly overblown as it became, was at least guilty of being overambitious, as opposed to merely restaging the first film in a slightly new scenario.

Oh, and about Ratner's billion-dollar Variety cover? Verbinski's last two flicks made a billion dollars each.

WT2: WTF

Today's hot new October straight-to-DVD sequel release: Wrong Turn 2. Director Joe Lynch angled to have it called Another Wrong Turn, but more level heads prevailed, and instead it's Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. No word on the title in Spain, where the original was called Kilometer 666.

The first film has enough fans to make 2 a profitable venture. Written by Alan McElroy, whose debut script was Halloween 4, and directed by Rob Schmidt (currently in post-production on The Alphabet Killer - check out that cast!), it made good money ($15 mil domestic and another $30 in rentals), despite being so rote an exercise that it's simply titled with one of the dismissive nicknames for the subgenre whose numbers it paints by. Various expectably good-looking young folk (Eliza Dushku, Desmond Harrington, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto) take an incorrect pathway of some kind and wind up pursued by hungry garden-variety mutant cannibal killer dealies.

If this setup is unimaginably usual, Turi Meyer and Al Septien's draft for the sequel is comically not so, though somehow still not original:

Retired Marine Colonel Dale Murphy* (Henry Rollins) hosts a reality TV show, a sort of Survivor in the remote boonies of West Virginia. Naturally, they're shooting a little too close to the cannibalizing grounds, and it all goes proverbially off script quickly.

Lead Erica Leerhsen is no stranger to this region, having played in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and Blair Witch Project 2, and, of course, working for Woody Allen twice. Besides Leerhsen and Rollins, Wrong Turn 2 features another batch of fine young folks, most of whom have at least one horror sequel to their name: Texas Battle and Crystal Lowe (Final Destination 3), Aleksa Palladino (The Ring 2), Daniella Alonso (The Hills Have Eyes II).

Other small notes:
-There's a soundtrack available, certainly unusual for a straight-to-video horror sequel.
-Fox scrapped a planned two-sided ("flipper") disc, and with it the director's commentary. It's being hosted at Dread Central for a free download.
-The film's official website includes a game called Cannibal Baseball World Series. Very timely.

*

Scream and Scream Again

Scream 4 is not in the immediate works, as some sites reported. A blog claiming to be that of the Weinstein Company made the claim recently, and it was picked up and bandied about. The Weinsteins have denied it, and the blog has disappeared.


This has confirmed certain initial suspicions, and cemented my policy of not reporting news if its purveyor uses the possessive in place of the plural and has no basic grasp of sentence structure. The direct cribs from Variety didn't help either.

As far as rumors to fraudulently jump-start, it's not a bad one, seeing as it isn't completely out of the blue. Neve Campbell mentioned a couple years ago that she'd been approached for Scream but wasn't intending to sign on. Wes Craven also spoke of the project (without too much interest).

In the meantime, you can always check out Final Stab, a 2001 slasher by absurdly prolific DTV auteur David DeCoteau. It's called Final Scream in the UK, having come out just a year after the pitiful conclusion to the Scream trilogy, and apparently made the bootleg rounds in the U.S. as Scream 4. Who knew people were claiming to have bootleg copies of Scream 4?

White Light: White Heat

The writer on board for the Near Dark remake is Matt Venne, whose feature script debut is still waiting for its U.S. release. White Noise (2005) was more (financially) successful than any of us probably remembered, grossing about $56 million on a $10 mil budget.

White Noise: The Light is a semisequel, sharing nothing with the original except for its star, electronic voice phenomena, in the title role. Second billing goes to Nathan Fillion, third billing to Katee Sackhoff (sequel work Halloween: Resurrection). Fillion's cult following should guarantee the flick a small boost, with a lot of folks who'd throw a few bucks down to rent anything with him in it, even if they're not likely to shell out to add White Noise 2 to the permanent collection.

The movie has shown theatrically in the UK and around the world from January through the summer, but it seems more likely to be a DVD release stateside. Its worldwide take is around $3 million so far; budgetary figures aren't currently available, but without Michael Keaton's salary to pay, you've gotta assume it's creeping up on its initial investment already.

White Noise 2 currently outranks its predecessor in IMDb quality assessment, with a 6.1 to the original's 5.3.

After Dark

Are vampires still the go-to monster?

Horror film owes much of its existence to Dracula. Vampire flicks have persisted through the decades, and in my travels through the Halloween sections of the local stores, vampire imagery is everywhere. Do kids still dress as Dracula? I'm not sure those of trick-or-treat age these days are watching Dracula or its offspring (of the night) anymore.

Considering it's still the dominant horror image from candy to castles, there sure haven't been a lot of vampire movies worth showing your kids (or watching for yourself) in the last few decades. Here and there are scattered a few interesting entries, and one of these is Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red's outstanding 1987 Near Dark. (Unfortunately, using 1987 as a handy comparison point, for every Near Dark, there's a Lost Boys.)

A 2008 remake of Near Dark is in the treatment stages at Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes studio. Bay gives the directing gig to Samuel Bayer, a fellow music-video veteran who got his start with Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit video. Bayer's music video and commercial credits number in the hundreds, with numerous awards to his name, but Near Dark will be his first feature.

The Species Problem

Speaking of Movie Maniacs figures, Sci Fi network premieres, straight-to-DVD releases for today, and such, Species: The Awakening is coming along as well.

Species came along in 1995 and brought with it Natasha Henstridge, who's worked solidly since, but whose IMDb page still lists under AKA heading The Chick from Species, and probably always will.

Its combination of reputable actors (the cast includes two Oscar winners in Ben Kingsley and Forest Whitaker), general silliness, H.R. Giger-designed lead, and unclothed bosoms made it a fair hit on home video and late-evening cable. Species did well enough for a 1998 theatrical sequel.

For Species II (working titles: Species II: Origins and Species II: Offspring), the talented Peter Medak took over directorial duties from Roger Donaldson. Though he directed a handful of episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street and other probably-good television shows, it's probably safe to say his best work is behind him. The Ruling Class is a long way back, but his work through the 1980s is still worth watching. Depending on your predilections, you might set the cutoff point in 1980 (The Changeling) or 1981 (Zorro, the Gay Blade); if anyone wants to argue 1986 (The Men's Club), well, I'll be surprised, but let me know.

Natasha Henstridge returned in II, but not as the bad guy (an infected astronaut). She appeared in III as well; this time, the dangerous alien was her daughter. Helmed by Brad Turner, a prolific TV director, Species III headed straight to video in 2004. Part IV , directed by Nick Lyon and scripted by Part III writer Ben Ripley, seems to take leave of the Henstridge storyline - apparently some scientist's niece turns out to contain some of the alien DNA. It's evidently based on a throwaway line from the first film, in which Ben Kingsley mentions a spare embryo or something, which turns out to be relevant three films down the line. Oh well.

Laugh at him and you're undone / But in some dreadful fashion

Happy October!

To kick off a month of mostly-horror news (unlike all those other months), a timely mix of autumnal vegetation and thematic film: Pumpkinhead 4 comes to DVD tomorrow.

Based on a poem, no foolin', the original Pumpkinhead (1989) was f/x superstar Stan Winston's first and second-to-last directorial effort. Made for a modest $3.5 million, it didn't clear much more than that in theaters, but enjoyed a fairly successful run on video. A direct-to-VHS sequel, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, arrived in 1994, not to be confused with the PC shooter Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge, made available the following year (first videogame adaptation of a straight-to-video sequel? note to self: research).

Silence on the Pumpkinhead film front for over a decade (though in 1999 or so, Todd McFarlane attested to his popularity with inclusion in the Movie Maniacs action figure line, ahead of such luminaries as Ash and Brundlefly), until a new contract appeared. In 2006, Pumpkinhead 3: Ashes to Ashes and Pumpkinhead 4: [ugh] Love Hurts were filmed back-to-back, going on to premiere on the Sci Fi network. Thankfully, #4 was renamed Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud before release.

Pumpkinhead 4 is directed by Mike Hurst, no stranger to the straight-to-Sci Fi sequel gig, having headed up 2005's House of the Dead 2, and the less said about that, the better.