Oct 23 - Oct 29
Pumpkinhead, Final Destination 5, Sister Death, Dune [1984]
- Pumpkinhead [1988] - 48
1988’s Pumpkinhead is a weird amalgam of things that could work together, but required more effort than the writers put in. It’s kind of a Jeepers Creepers, it’s kind of an Alien, and it’s kind of a Halloween… but there’s never any finesse used to join these things together. So it all just sort of… happens. Should the Academy ever come up with a new award for “The Most Plot in a Film”, Pumpkinhead would certainly take it posthumously. It just never stops adding new points. Annoyingly, looking at the story in a broad way, it really is mostly interesting and feels like a folk tale [as the poster suggests]… the problem is that there’s just so many elements and nearly all of them are entirely erroneous. It’s a fun enough watch if you’re in for some Mystery Science Theater 3000 action but, unless you think saying “I’m Bishop from Aliens” every time Lance Henriksen shows up on screen is funny… you might not get a lot of mileage from this one.
- Final Destination 5 [2011] - 35
If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. The Final Destination series is at its best when it’s being a little self aware and not leaning on visual effects too much. The more visceral the violence and the longer characters dance around dangerous objects before meeting their ultimate demise, the better. That said, outside of one untimely and very silly death, FD5 mostly misses these marks. Having just watched 2013’s Oblivion last week, I have a really fresh idea of what CGI from the era could look like, and FD5 seems to have been stuck in effects from a couple decades prior; making the whole thing cheap and goofy. It’s fun enough for a movie-night with friends, but there are better, tenser, and grosser films within this genre. Though the ending twist is fun for fans of the series, for those who aren’t refreshed on the 11-year old franchise [at time of release], it’ll mostly just be confusing.
- Sister Death [2023] - 66
Another strange combination of things this week is the 2023 Netflix release, Sister Death. Like some of my favorite recent films, this horror is shot in 4:3 [A Ghost Story, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell it To, You Won’t Be Alone], is a haunting mystery like longtime favorites The Others and Hereditary, and features a trope that I think is fun and won’t spoil, but will compare to The Ring. The film has great cinematography, great performances, and is generally a very enjoyable ride, it just forgets that horror/ mysteries live and die by their reveals… and Sister Death’s reveal is… “fine”. There’s a lot of things that go unexplained in the film, but not in the “fun and spooky” way, instead in the “I’m lacking context to make this meaningful” way. It’s far from a bad film, it’s just very uneven at times and feels like several pieces of other things were used as templates rather than inspirations.
- Dune [1984] - DNF
I don’t think anyone needs to belabor any points about 1984’s Dune. It’s bad, we know it’s bad… but the confusing thing is that it didn’t have to be bad. Costumes, production design, art direction… it’s all kind of unironically great. The cast is full of very talented people that we know from various things here in 2023, Lynch has done many lasting and iconic pieces, and the source material is rich and dense, perfect for an adaptation… yet, somehow, it all comes together to make, as I called it in my family group-chat, a “real asshole of a movie”.
