Director Maria Lee Metheringham’s “Pumpkins” is a film that would have worked so much better as a short form segment in an anthology horror film. As a feature length film, it falls painfully flat. Everything that needs to be resolved about the narrative is literally resolved in the first half hour. Everything else is merely filler that transforms what could have been an interesting revenge tale in to another slasher film.
An old man (name unspecified) living on his farm in North Yorkshire with his prized pumpkin patch is tormented by the local youths who destroy everything he loves in one evening of revenge. His corpse is then consumed by the pumpkins and something sinister rises from the ground in the form of a hulking, pumpkin headed killer. A rampage of death and terror ensues when a group of unlucky survivalists and local people get caught up in the carnage.
The concept of an old man seeking revenge for his prized possessions and his uneven niece encouraging his vengeful spirit has a lot of potential. Literally the first half hour tells us everything we need to know and want to know. The writers then send us on this journey where the nameless farmer with a pumpkin head (not even the killer is given a name!) just unnecessarily murders a group of survivalists on a camping trip. I think had writer/director/co-star Maria Lee Metheringham had actually fleshed out the script, this could have served as a great bit of Halloween oriented folklore.
The story of an impoverished family, an old man who cherishes his gourds, and his spirit coming back to avenge his death would have been fun. The movie spends almost no time on our central characters, and we have almost no insight in to the teenagers that cause this old man’s death. We just know they’re unruly delinquents, that they take their anger out on his prized pumpkins and—well, the end. The movie spends so much time on literally nothing, even wasting two or three minutes on the characters hiking through the woods, and there’s even a weird musical number in a pub.
I would have loved to learn a lot about the spirit that overtakes this old man’s body, what connection it has to him, why it happened to him, et al. But there’s just no explanation or even a hint. For what it’s worth Maria Lee Metheringham’s film is competently directed, and I do enjoy how she builds on tension and suspense. It’s just that once we meet these new characters, and spend zero time with them, they merely become cannon fodder, and nothing more. “Pumpkins” has a good idea, and seeds for some great genre fare it just sadly drops the ball and transforms in to yet another stale slasher film.
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