The Pumpkin Karver Movie Review

Cheapie slasher movies are an awfully predictable genre, especially ones with intentional typos in their titles. Robert Mann's The Pumpkin Karver is fortunately far from awful, but its very setup recalls some of the least frightening horror franchises ever made. Sure enough, this Karver has a couple of fleeting moments of mild terror, but mostly it's painting by the numbers.

The setup gives us a young boy on Halloween who, mistaking his sister's knife-wielding prankster boyfriend for a real murderer, viciously stabs him to death to "protect" her. Whoops, turns out it was a fake knife. Cut to years later and young Jonathan (Michael Zara) is all grown up, but the memory of, you know, stabbing a dude in the face can't be positive. Halloween has returned, and Jonathan joins a gaggle of co-eds and frat boy types in a weird kind of party on some sort of pumpkin farm. Pretty soon he's having visions, seeing the creepy chopped-up-head boyfriend and some old guy who keeps telling him, in the most outrageous yokel/pirate drawl imaginable, "Yer a carrrrrrrrverrrrrrrrrr!"

As the body count rises we're left to wonder which of these three is doing the carrrrrving: Jonathan, dead boyfriend, or creepy old guy. Go ahead and make your pick now. I'll wait. The gore is decent (especially one poor girl who basically gets her face ripped off), and the acting is largely poor. In the end, the killer is revealed but the inevitable last-second twist takes the film into the realm of total nonsense. I guess it's par for the course. Er, kourse.