THE PUMPKIN KARVER

THE PUMPKIN KARVER

Lynn (Amy Weber, KOLOBOS) and her brother Jonathan (Michael Zara, WAIT) are home alone one Halloween night. She's indulging in some heavy petting with her drunken boyfriend Alec while Jonathan is busy carving a scary face into a pumpkin.

As Alec leaves, Lynn tells him she'll follow shortly - then retires to her room to get ready for going out. Before long a figure wearing a pumpkin mask has entered her room and is attacking her with a knife. Hearing her screams, Jonathan races up the stairs and stabs the attacker repeatedly in the face, killing them.

As the mask is removed, they discover it was Alec - with a plastic knife, playing a harmless prank on Lynn. Oops.

One year later, Lynn and Jonathan set off for the small town of Carver, to start a new life. Jonathan is still wracked with guilt over the "accident". Lynn tries to convince him that it wasn't his fault, he did what anyone would've done, etc.

They finally arrive at their destination, a party being held in celebration of Halloween. Lynn already has a friend in Carver, the pretty Tammy (Minka Kelly, STATE'S EVIDENCE). Lynn has organised to hook Tammy up with her hapless brother, and the couple seem to get on well.

As the afternoon progresses, more dumb teens arrive with crates of beer, adorned in various fancy dress guises (Austin Powers, the Hulk, Marilyn Monroe etc).

But Jonathan gets the distinct impression that something is not right. He starts suffering from vivid hallucinations involving an attacker in a pumpkin mask.

Inevitably, come nighttime, the party is in full flow with sex, booze and even a live punk band.

As the dumb teens get more and more wrecked, one cute girl leaves the party temporarily to retrieve something from her car. Unfortunately there's someone waiting outside, and the cutie winds up having her face ripped off with a blunt chisel. The others continue to party indoors, oblivious to the danger lurking outside ...

A dumb premise requires us to suspend our disbelief, before settling into a rather banal but easy-on-the-brain whodunit. THE PUMPKIN KARVER doesn't offer anything new (on the contrary, it rips off ever slasher convention conceivable) but doesn't pretend to be anything special either: it serves only to throw a few good-looking teens at the screen, kill them off in mildly bloody ways and offer a so-so twist at the end.

To these ends, it succeeds.

The cinematography is almost as attractive as the young cast, making THE PUMPKIN KARVER a glossy affair that knows how to use its desert locations to good effect.

Performances are generally good, with the script being the weak link here, rendering almost all of the characters unlikeable.

But with a nippy pace, decent production values and some half-decent jump-scares peppered intermittently throughout, you can almost forgive Robert Mann's (TRAPPED) workman-like direction.

It's a credible rental, if not worth a buy.

Revolver's disc offers the movie uncut in a nice sharp anamorphic 1.85:1 transfer. Bright, vibrant, vivid - if nothing else, THE PUMPKIN KARVER looks fabulous.

English audio is available in both 2.0 and 5.1 mixes. Both do their job extremely proficiently.

Static menu pages include a scene-selection menu allowing access to the main feature via 12 chapters.

Extras are limited. First up is 5 minutes of mildly amusing, time-coded bloopers.

Next is a melodramatic deleted ending that doesn't work so well (as corny as the film's actual ending is, it's better) - it's not difficult to see how this found it's way onto the cutting room floor.

Finally there's a pretty effective trailer (better than the film, in fact).

The disc also has default trailers when it loads up - these are for WRESTLEMANIAC, KILLING FLOOR and JIMMY AND JUDY.

Review by Stu Willis


 
Released by Revolver Entertainment
Region 2 - PAL
Rated 18
Extras :
see main review
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