An unpopular farmer (Terry Wood) with a rather disconcerting pumpkin fetish, meets his end thanks to being scared to death by two hooligans (Dale Hooley and Nathan Jordie Keers), but he won’t stay dead for long, as the unhallowed ground he is buried in resurrects his ass as Pumpkin Man (Will Metheringham), a monstrous mountain of a man with a pumpkin visage that goes all in on the murder biz along with some living pumpkins (wait… what the fuck now?)!
That’s all well and good, but in order to have a slasher opus you need victims… and along comes Lance (Roland Martial) and Denise (Sarah Jayne Curry); guides employed by a group of survival nuts to lead them to remote territory, which of course is directly on Pumpkin Man’s land.
Naturally stalk n’ slay ghoulish goodness ensues, and our hapless heroes run afoul of not only our outre orange antagonist, but his naughty niece (played by the film’s director Maria Lee Metheringham) who assists her uncle in his horror biz! Fuck; these folks are going to be dead as door-nails…
Pumpkins never aspires to be something it ain’t; namely a fun, and at times over-the-top, homage to the fright flicks populating the video store shelves and silver screens smack-dab in the middle of the golden age of slasher sinema, the eerie eighties!
To that end, we get well-done gore and creative kills while a maniac plays cat n’ mouse with his prey; the meat and potatoes of our beloved sub-genre… and not much else. While admittedly derivative (more on that below), lovers of slasher flicks will get exactly what they crave here, let me assure you, and that is obviously a huge positive, right my boils n’ ghouls?
Another plus is the memorable and unique lascivious lunatic featured here; his pumpkin face and gourd minions are both memorable and entertaining as all fuck (that’s a term real professional critics like yours cruelly use); and make the film worth viewing on their own… buuuuuuttt…
On the negative side, this picture doesn’t try to reinvent the wicked wheel; so those looking for unbelievably profound and genre defining uniqueness can focus their putrid peepers elsewhere; this is a slasher as pure and simple as they come, so just enjoy it for what it is, dig?
If you love slasher flicks, and want a film that will give you 100% what you expect and desire, then look no further than Pumpkins; it’s a deviously delightful jaunt into tried and true terror territory, that manages to present a few solid idiosyncratic elements all it’s own along the way!
