Pumpkinhead 2 (1994) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

A new sheriff is getting his physical from the small town's doctor. Suddenly, as if to announce the appearance of a king in an Elizabethan play, a doughy herald walks in and says, "Sheriff? Doc? The mayor will see you now." One of them says "Well, send him in," and in comes his austere honor, named Mayor Bubba. The mayor greets them, then turns to a member of the doctor's staff and says, "you got my gee-tar?" He is handed his guitar, and dispenses a few perfunctory words of wisdom to the new sheriff, stuff like, "This ain't such a small town. We got our problems too." Then he leaves, having apparently come with his herald just to pick up his freshly-tuned guitar from a doctor's office.

Who wrote that scene, Luis Bunuel?

When the mayor picked up his guitar I thought it was going to be a musical. The only thing that could make the scene any weirder is if Mayor Bubba had been played by the First Bubba, President Clinton. Even that was close. The mayor was actually played by Bill's brother, Roger!¹ Ol' Rog didn't sing in character as the mayor, but he did sing the theme song! To imagine it, sing the following to the tune of the theme from the Spiderman cartoon.

Pumpkinhead, Pumpkinhead

Says whatever a pumpkin said.

He is cursed ... by the Lord

He is named ... for a gourd

Beware.

Here comes the Pumpkinhead.

I'm kidding about that song, but Clinton really did sing the theme. Here's the real soundtrack info. The craziest thing about the score is a scene in which Pumpkinhead is slaughtering some brutal redneck - to the tune of one of those sad-ass "hound dog and trains and lost love" songs.

The plot is the official stock horror story. As the legend is pictured, a deformed and retarded teenager named Tommy was tortured and hanged back in the 50s, apparently by the road show cast of West Side Story. Now the lad Tommy has somehow become a creature of ancient evil - Pumpkinhead by name - who can only be kept under wraps by a voodoo spell of some kind which keeps him in his grave. Most small town teenagers would be happy to avoid resurrecting evil creatures and to restrict their carousing to getting high and getting laid, but one particular crowd of young local thrill-seekers is jaded enough to think it would be fun to disturb Tommy's grave², even though it resembles Stonehenge, and despite the fact that the local witch tells them, "You don't know the evil you are conjuring, boy³." I guess it would have been OK with her if they had conjured some more familiar evil. Needless to say, when Mr. Head⁴ emerges, he goes after the West Side Story kids who are still alive, and then after the other kids who recently disturbed his eternal rest. Some of the latter are the children of the former.

The honest sheriff tries to cope with the ancient evil, inspired by the fact that he's married to that chick who was once so hot in My Tutor⁵. Oh, sure, the sheriff just moved back to town, but he grew up in the small town and he understands the proper process of socialization. He says things to his daughter like, "Honey, I told you you shouldn't be running with the crowd that likes to conjure up ancient evil. You know we're new in town." Later on in the film, the sheriff is awakened by a phone call that goes something like, "Sorry to wake you, sheriff, but it looks like we got more o' that there ancient evil conjured up out at the Jones place."

As the film slogs through its predictable paces, it features a guest appearance from Linnea Quigley, who shows why she is called a scream queen^6&7, provides the genre-mandatory gratuitous nudity, and provides the most realistic moment of simple white trash life, when she gets out of bed to get some cigarettes from her car. She walks from a falling-down shack to her falling-apart car, through the mud and rusted car parts, all while wearing her red high-heeled pumps!⁸

Sensibly enough, the sheriff of the town wants to dispatch the ancient evil back to its grave, but Mayor Bubba wants to catch it alive and turn it into a tourist attraction to revive the town's sagging economy. Gee, guess which one of them will be killed by the Pumpkinhead. Well, Pumpkinhead kills off all the 1958 gang and all the new gang except the sheriff's daughter. He spares her because it turns out the sheriff used to be Pumpkinhead's only friend when they were boys. Does that surprise you? Of course, the story cannot end there because Pumpkinhead has gained complete revenge against his tormentors and would have nobody left to kill in the next sequel. Therefore, after Pumpkinhead compassionately frees the sheriff's daughter, he is brutally slaughtered and hanged by another gang of ignorant stock characters, thus recreating the scene in which he was first killed in 1958.

I would not want to be one of those guys in Pumpkinhead 3.