31 Days of Halloween (Days 14 and 15) - The Descent and Pumpkinhead

So, life intruded on my Halloweening (now an official word; enjoy) yesterday. That means that today, you get a two-fer.

First up, one of my favorite horror films in the last decade, The Descent.

Set a year after an accident kills protagonist Sarah's (Shauna MacDonald) husband and daughter, a group of her girlfriends organize a spelunking (spelunking, your power-word of the day) trip in the wilds of West Virginia. Sarah is having problems coping with her loss, is on various drugs and might be a little unstable. No matter, because, in short order, her and her gal pals are trapped in an unmapped series of caves that are infested with blind, sonar-user humanoids who hunger for the tender flesh of our heroines.

A blind, cave-dwelling, humanoid thingy voguing for the camera. You're fabu darling and you know it.

The all-female cast, along with the generally well-developed characters (not all of the women are amazon-tough, not all of them are screaming monster fodder), some very creepy scenes (most of the jump scares are earned, although there are a lot of them) and great looking monsters make this movie more than just your standard monster flick. Director Neil Marshall doesn't skimp on the gore (something that is a trade mark of his other movies, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday and Centurion). And, the ending is appropriately bleak, with everyone - apparently - dead except for Sarah who has gone completely mental and is huddled in the dark, thinking she is with her dead daughter.

Juno (aka Natalie Mendoza) getting ready to open up a whole can of kick ass...now with Spring-TimeTM fresh scent

It's not perfect, of course. There are a couple of character actions - like one of the women deciding to run blindly through the caverns until she falls and gives herself a nice compound fracture - that leave you saying "huh?" And the story does hinge on one of the characters - Juno (the pretty awe-inspiring Natalie Mendoza) - finding a massive, unknown cave system and then being dumb enough to bring a bunch of her friends into it, not knowing what they might find. But, how many stories don't have contrivances? Not many.

Finally, if you ever felt the need to go exploring caves, this movie will cure of that. I would get about five feet, assume the entire mountain was going to collapse on me and run out screaming.

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Okay, we know leave the caves for the ruralest of rural America. 1988's Pumpkinhead is a fun story of supernatural revenge and shirtless, flamethrower wielding Lance Henricksen. Does it get better than this? Oh, yes it does...yes it does.

Pumpkinhead giving the camera his best side.

Directed by special effects master Stan Winston, the movie features a sweet monster - the demonic killing-machine Pumpkinhead. Stan Winston demonstrates that he knows how to deliver effects driven horror. What he lacks is the ability to get much out of his actors with the exception of Lance Henriksen.

A group of "city folk" on their way to a backwoods cabin accidentally kills Henriksen's son. Lance decides to get some payback, redneck-style and...well, visits a witch...who raise a demon. Funny, I would've thought redneck-style involved shotguns and requests to "squeal like a pig." Shows what I know about the ways of "country folk."

The demon starts picking off the "city folk," something Lance experiences. Feeling guilty, he sets out to stop the monster any way he can. He also finds that as the monster kills more people his face is taking on demonic characteristics and the creature is starting to look like him. Most of the "city folk" wind up dead and Henriksen has to sacrifice his own life to stop the creature. Of course, there is a bit of a twist in the end, as Henriksen finds out the price for summoning Pumpkinhead is to take his place.

The movie does suffer from poor acting and cliched characters. The victims are one-dimensional and the acting flat. The story itself is okay, although Henriksen's shift from "kill-em-all" to "I want to stop this" is abrupt and not developed.

With that in mind, I still recommend Pumpkinhead. It moves at a fast pace, has a really neat backwoods-mythology feel and features one of the most memorable practical effects monsters from the 80s. Check out both movies...and never leave the cities!

Once the cameras stop rolling, actors and demons are best friends. Isn't that heart-warming?