It’s Halloween in one of those typical American small towns we all know from direct to video productions shot in Florida. After a graveyard disturbance, a gentleman with a large light up pumpkin for a head and wielding a scythe is wandering around very slowly indeed and killing everyone he gets his hands on. Apparently, his appearance is part of a curse a warlock (some archival footage of poor John Carradine) cast on the descendants of the Kelly family, whom he held responsible for being burnt at the stake. Mind you, until the final act, Mr Pumpkinhead shows no preference for killing Kellys.
Nonetheless, we do get to spend a lot of time with the family, experience their haunted garage spook show, follow discussions of the joys of Halloween, thrill to their babysitter troubles, and so, and so forth. Eventually, Mr Pumpkinhead does shamble along to threaten the family’s youngest.
If you’re looking for cosy, nostalgic horror for the sad post-Halloween time Steve Latshaw’s low budget masterpiece of tacky American Halloween mood has your back. It’s a film haunted by the ghosts of Halloweens past. Pumpkinheads, a Linnea Quigley shower scene, a tasteful decapitation, horror hosts (in this case an archival Cameron Mitchell), home-made horror houses and horror-loving families are there and accounted for, as are the ghost of John Carradine, a knock-off synth score, fog, bad acting of the lovely kind, and the shambling and dreamy rhythms of childhood memories of movies that’ll turn out not all that frightening once you’ve grown up.
It’s a vibe, as they apparently say, a movie that feels as if the script to a cheap kid’s horror Halloween film had been spiced up with a bit of nudity and blood – the actual stuff of a horror movie childhood dreams. How could I not love Jack-O?
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