R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 hit streaming earlier this month.
R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 sprouts up on Tubi — and no, it has nothing to do with that one Lance Henriksen movie
There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. So forgive me for not watching R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead last year.
I know what you’re thinking. “James, don’t you RUN a horror website? How could that one slip past your radar?” Well, there’s no easy answer there. I mean, it was a heavily advertised movie and you’d THINK seeing the words “R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead” would pique my interest. Is it, like based on that old Lance Henriksen movie Pumpkinhead, only it’s written by the dude who penned all of those Goosebumps books? That’s a mighty big oversight on my part. Guess I was just too caught up in last fall’s “6-7” craze to spot the obvious.
Which brings us to R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2, which dropped on Tubi on Oct. 09, 2026. Since I didn’t see the first movie, of course I’m a little lost on the plot. But the film does a pretty good job of catching you up to speed (for the most part.) Before we dig deeper into the movie, let’s address some baseline details, why don’t we?
— No, the movie and its predecessor has NOTHING to do with the OTHER Pumpkinhead franchise that started in the ’80s. I mean, there are SOME thematic similarities, but they’re not technically the same thing. And if you’re not confused enough, BOTH characters are technically inspired by the L. Frank Baum character Jack Pumpkinhead. And … you know what, this is perplexing enough, I’m just going to cut my losses and move ahead.
— You know how it says R.L. Stine’s name in the title? Well, he gets a co-writing credit for the film, but he didn’t actually direct it. The actual director of the film is Jem Garrard, who also directed the first Pumpkinhead movie from 2025.
— So there IS a short story written by R.L. Stine called “Pumpkinhead” that was published in 1999. This sequel kinda sorta follows the story, but not really. And since I haven’t seen the first movie, yowzers, am I LOST.
With that out of the way, let me throw out one more caveat. Having not seen the first movie, I KNOW I’m gonna screw up the lore and gloss over some key details. But hey, I went into part two with a clean slate, and by golly, that’s what’s going to paint my review of this sucker.
Long story short … I just wasn’t feeling this one, fam.
You can kinda see what the filmmakers were going for. There’s already a pretty good template for middle-schooler-friendly PG-13 horror in the preceding Goosebumps movies, and the preceding Goosebumps TV show and the preceding Goosebumps books. But this movie doesn’t really feel like a traditional Goosebumps story. It’s hard to explain, but by the midway point of the movie you’ll see what I’m talking about.
R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 ends up feeling a LOT like a softer, fuzzier take on Stranger Things (replete with a very Upside Down-like plot component.) The special effects are actually pretty good, but the thrills never really kick in. There’s not much of a sense of “real” dread here, as you just assume there’s going to be some kinda magical deus ex machina at the end that negates all of the evil and foul stuff that goes down in the first one hour and twenty minutes of the flick.
Spoiler: that’s EXACTLY what happens.
It’s mostly a child cast in this one and they all do pretty well. The performance from Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Evan — the quiet kid who is always bullied and ends up turning into the main villain of the picture — is probably the highlight of the entire movie. That kid’s got stage presence, I’ll tell you that right now.
You can sum up the plot of R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 in just one sentence: evil incantation, monsters run amok, only a couple of precocious kids can save middle America from being eaten by gourd-headed harvest demons. Sure, it’s not the most original idea for a movie, but it does have a VERY big X-factor: none other than Cassandra Peterson herself has a MAJOR role in the film, and you can tell she has a blast chewing the scenery into sawdust.
I’m not saying that R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2 is a “bad” movie, per se, just that it didn’t really gel with me as much as I hoped. It’s a fairly long movie that takes a while to get going and there is a LOT of excess fat on the bone, cinematically speaking. It has its moments, but as far as contemporary gateway horror movies go, it’s not exactly the best of its ilk.
But hey, if it gets us one step closer to that big-budget adaptation of “Monster Blood” we’ve always wanted, what’s the problem?
