by: Dr. Boogie

Have you ever wondered where the world gets its supply of pumpkin spice? There's a reason it's only available in the fall, and it has nothing to do with seasonal purchasing trends.

In order to make pumpkin spice, you need two ingredients: a lowly dirt-farming country rube, and his obnoxiously-cute son. First, have a bunch of city folk come by your roadside crap shack and run the kid over. Next, dig up a gross old corpse in a pumpkin patch and bring both that corpse and the son corpse to an old crone in the mountains. Have the crone mix the blood of the father and son together, then heat it up and pour it on the weird corpse. After a few minutes, you'll have a vengeance-seeking demon that will brutally kill whoever killed your loved ones - and it'll also produce a festive fall treat.

The film Pumpkinhead documents one such use of this recipe on a group of doomed young nobodies in rural California.

Friends Tracy, Chris, and Joel have just been disarmed by a frightened hillbilly when the title character catches up to them

After the aforementioned hayseed runs off, Joel goes to grab the gun and fight back, but he gets some unexpected help from Ed Harley, aka the guy who loosed Pumpkinhead on them in the first place.

He puts a couple slugs in Pumpkinhead, and you could be forgiven for thinking Pumpkinhead was all show after watching him crap out after getting shot a little.

Joel certainly does. He walks right up to the body and ignores Chris whining that it might not be dead. Just in case, though, he gives Pumpkinhead one last shot in his pumpkin head.

Yep, Pumpkinhead is definitely dead. One hundred percent.

It would have been kind of a letdown if he was actually dead after all his earlier showboating. Maybe Joel finally came to appreciate that in the fleeting seconds where he was getting his feet ripped out from under him.

Pumpkinhead has nothing but a contemptuous sneer for Joel's rifle. It doesn't even look like it grazed him. Maybe that should've tipped Joel off that something was wrong.

For a moment, Joel must have wondered if this towering movie monster was simply going to shoot him. Ha ha, oh Joel, my sweet summer child...

Don't look so surprised, Joel. If Friday the 13th had just been Jason Voorhees picking up a glock and busting caps into the asses of those fornicating teenagers, it would've been a way less interesting movie.

Man, moments like this, you can almost forget that Joel spent the first half of the movie running over a kid, then beating up and imprisoning his friends so they wouldn't rat him out.

Joel's dead, but there are still a couple of tangentially-involved twenty somethings that need killing, too. That's the problem with Pumpkinhead: no precision. You set him loose on a particular person and he just nabs everybody in the area.

Also his head is only kind of pumpkin-shaped.

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