By Geno McGahee
The year is 2006 and it was still a good year to be a horror fan. I remember those days when I would drive to Hollywood Video or Blockbuster and pick up a horror title and I knew that it would probably be less than great, but it would still provide a night’s entertainment. I would rent movies like THE PUMPKIN KARVER. On the surface, it had everything. It was based around Halloween, it was low budget and it had a masked killer. How could I go wrong, but amazingly, I did go wrong.
THE PUMPKIN CARVER is written and directed by Robert Mann and although I could be wrong, I don’t believe he is a true horror fan. The film is strange. At moments, I think I’m watching the work of a pretentious filmmaker, eager to show that they are smarter than horror fans, and then, at other moments, I think that I’m watching the work of a mentally challenged person. This was written by two people, so maybe I’m spot on with my assessment.
We begin with Lynn (Amy Weber), getting ready for her Halloween date with her boyfriend, Alec (David J. Wright). She walks around in a robe with barely anything underneath and answers the door to two children dressed like the characters from MEN IN BLACK and conversing with her in a way that no child would ever speak. Wow, the writing was terrible. Her brother, Jonathan (Michael Zara), carves a pumpkin at the kitchen table and seems troubled. When she goes to get dressed, Alec starts bullying Jonathan, belching in his face, spraying him with beer, ruining his pumpkin, and then spraying him with the remaining beer in his bottle. To make matters worse, Alec returns dressed as a pumpkin-faced killer, and goes through all the actions that you’ve seen in SCREAM, as he attacks Lynn, as a practical joke. Jonathan hears the ruckus and kills the intruder, only to discover that it was Alec. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Time passes by and Jonathan and Lynn are en route to a big Halloween party at a pumpkin patch. They pass an old man that is angry and is an immediate suspect, if this was a whodunit…which it barely is. They make it to the party and meet up with a bunch of idiots, including AJ (Jonathan Conrad), dressed like Austin Powers and doing his best impressions. What the fuck? I know it was popular at one time and everyone and their uncle were doing them, but the second you start adding crap like this to your movie, you date it and you make it difficult to watch. Anyway, the Powers impression was the least of this film’s problems.
Lance (David Austin), dressed like a pirate, and Grazer (Jared Show), dressed like the Hulk, are awaiting the girls to arrive, which includes the Charlie’s Angels, made up of Rachel (Charity Shea), Yolanda (Mistie Adams) and Viki (Briana Gerber). I sort of feel sorry for a lot of these actors. They are capable but stuck in this film. So, in order to avoid character development, we see just caricatures with one or two attributes to separate them from the others. Lance is a jerk. Rachel is promiscuous. Grazer is overweight…so he’s going to puke and eat a lot. Viki and Yolanda are merely there for eye candy. Don’t ask too much from them. We also have the biggest problem of this film: Spinner (Alex Weed) and Bonedaddy (David Phillips), two stoners that only talk about drugs and drinking and are constantly making bad jokes, including a Scooby Doo impression. I’m not alone, I’m sure, hating them, but once again, I don’t blame them. They were directed. They did what they were told.
Jonathan meets up with Lance’s ex-girlfriend, Tammy (Minka Kelly), and the two hit it off. This enrages Lance who only knows to fight. That is his entire character. He is a jerk that wants to fight. Why AJ and Grazer would hang out with him is anyone’s guess, but they do. Minka Kelly was very good in this, remarkably. Had she had something really good to work with, she would have shined. She did her best with what she had and her and Zara worked well off each other, but it was too much of an uphill battle.
Bodies pile up, the pumpkin-faced killer is on the loose, and it could be anyone or it could be Jonathan snapping again…or it could be me taking the DVD and smashing it into a million pieces and vowing never again to watch another movie. Whatever the case, the ending of this film is stupid and the trip to get to the ending is agonizing. Wow, this was terrible.
THE PUMPKIN KARVER is one of the worst horror films I have ever seen. Mann may be a good writer, but he had a bad day here and could not write believable dialogue. Every character with the exception of a few, and I credit good acting for this, is totally unbelievable. I get the idea that Mann wanted to break into the business ,heard horror films are the way to go, wrote one and didn’t have a true love for the genre. It shows. This is a terrible film with no redeeming values outside of some of the performances of the actors and actresses, especially Weber, Zara and Kelly.
Rating: 1/10
