Pumpkinhead IV : Les Sacrifiés

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Fued (2007) is a movie I've been looking for forever and finally caved and watched on Amazon Prime for $10.99. The storyline follows the famous feud between the Hatfields and McCoy's when one of the Hatfields falls in love with one of the McCoys. Unfortunately for the love story, Pumpkinhead may decide he's the only one that can settle the feud between the two sides...

This movie is directed by Michael Hurst (House of the Dead II) and stars Lance Henriksen (Aliens), Rob Freeman (Saving Private Ryan), Amy Manson (T2 Trainspotting) and Richard Durden (Batman).

The movie starts with a great kill scene. The storyline for this is pretty bad and the dialogue and script is uneven. However, the Pumpkinhead special effects are solid and the gore and kill scenes were better than I expected. Henriksen was awesome in this and ties this film back to the first film well.

This is easily the best Pumpkinhead sequel and is definitely worth a watch for fans of the series/character. I would score this a 5.5/10 and recommend seeing it once.

True to the original classic, this installment is a classic in its own right, and the second best in the series (next to the original). The McCoys and Hatfield's family feud resulted in the death Ricky McCoy's young sister. When Pumpkinhead is called for revenge, the families must stand together to survive. With a good script and solid acting, this fourth installment almost lives up to the original.

Pumpkinhead was in itself a decent 80s horror flick. No classic by any means, but an enjoyable piece of fluff. Why then, have we now been treated to a fourth film in this franchise is beyond me. As in previous sequels, there's nothing here to really connect the films except for the monster, the witch and Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen). This time out we follow the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Part of the film is a Romeo And Juliet romance as a young McCoy boy and his Hatfield lover decide to run away to be together. Soon, however, they are torn apart and the boy's sister is killed. The boy escapes to the woods and gets the witch to resurrect Pumpkinhead for some vengeance. The acting is passable at best, amateurish at the worst. The titular demon doesn't even really show up for almost forty minutes and when it does its a pale comparison between it and the original design. Overall, Blood Feud fails to impress. It may be worth a watch once, but certainly not an addition to the collection.

It was a bit surprising to note that this fourth movie from the Pumpkinhead franchise was the best of the sequels to watch. Not that that means that it was a great movie though but it featured a decent enough story, that stays true to the Pumpkinhead-franchise but is not as predictable and clichéd as its predecessors. The characters are all better and the movie also features a decent enough amount of gore to pleasure the genre-fans.

The movie has the same look and feels as the third movie "Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes" and also seems to be shot at the same locations. This isn't a very positive thing though. It got shot in Romania, which is of course nothing like the South of the USA, which made the first Pumpkinhead movie such an atmospheric one.

The movie features some pretty good effects, which also provides the movie with some nice gory moments. It also uses the monster at the right moments and it doesn't make the mistake of featuring it as prominently as any of the other earlier sequels.

Yet again the movie features Lance Henriksen, who had played the main character almost 20 years prior to this movie, in the first Pumpkinhead movie from 1988, directed by Stan Winston. He also reappeared in "Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes" but his role in that movie was rather small and pointless. In this movie his character doesn't make a totally redundant impression and it's a pleasure to watch him in this movie. It still gives the movie a certain bit of more overall professionality over it, despite its overall obvious low-budget look and feel.

A decent enough movie and certainly the best out of the so far three sequels made.

5/10

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This fourth entry in the "Pumpkinhead"-saga (damn, that's kind of a depressing thing to write) finally goes for the element we've all been waiting for in this series: a Romeo and Juliet storyline. This movie provides us with an important lesson: if there's one thing that can truly express how much you really love a girl, it's by summoning a demon and instructing it to kill her entire family. Duely noted. Other than that the movie doesn't really provide much new, but it's entertaining and gory and just good enough for a lazy evening. It all seems to be in good fun, even the scene where the monster advances on a dude in a wheelchair is suspiciously humorous. The highlights of the movie are Lance Henriksen's interventions though, when it comes to delivering random wise-sounding monologues in rarely-seen genre movies he can't really be topped. Overall "Blood Feud" is a decent sequel, nothing less nothing more.