 | |
List Price: $9.98 | | Label: First Look Pictures
Salesrank: 84360
Released: October 3, 2006 |
| Our Price: $4.39 |
| Used Price: $1.90 |
|
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
|
Editorial Review:
A feature film based on a story in which a young man is stabbed to death on the evening of October 31 2003. One year later at a Halloween party six people were brutally butchered in a remote location. The victims faces were carved and mutilated beyond recognition. The crime is still unsolved and is currently under investigation. System Requirements:Run Time: 90 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: NR UPC: 687797113795 Manufacturer No: FLP-11379
The Pumpkin Karver Reviews:
it's the uncarvable pumpkin Charlie Brown 
2009-08-07 - I've never seen a movie this bad, lol.
This is one terrible film. It's not scary, it's not intereting, it's not *anything*. It's just bland, boring, generic, typical, low budget horror storytelling. From beginning to end, horrendous acting and forgettable.
The entire story was pointless to me. A bunch of teens go to some desert, party the night away, have pointless pumpkin carving tournaments, develop romantic relationships with each other, walk around all night doing nothing noteworthy, etc. BAD MOVIE.
So is the movie scary? haha, don't make me laugh. The only thing scary is how someone out there thought this junk was good enough to be released. I DID think the one female actress walking around wearing a hat was super hot, but that's not enough to save a film that makes pumpkins cry.
Boring and predictable. 
2009-02-07 - The Pumpkin Karver (Robert Mann, 2006)
Somewhere inside the bland, predictable, unscary mess that is The Pumpkin Karver is a brilliant meditation on trauma, mental illness, and coming of age just waiting to emerge. And that makes it all the more annoying that we got this movie and not that one. But what really gets me was the big plot twist at the end. Not that it was handled badly during the big reveal, but that it was so badly handled during the rest of the movie that I couldn't believe they were using it as the big reveal; I really had no idea that they hadn't meant the identity of the killer to be obvious from about ten minutes into the movie. In other words, yeah, I was going to talk a lot in this review about the disappointment of failed potential until I got to the last scene. Now I don't know where to go with this at all.
Michael Zara stars as Jonathan Starks, who, in the opening scene, makes an understandable but fatal mistake resulting in the death of his sister Lynn (Son of the Beach's Amy Weber)'s boyfriend Alec (David J. Wright). Fast-forward a year. Jonathan's family has moved to a new town after the police cleared Jonathan of any wrongdoing, but he's still suffering from crushing guilt. Jonathan and Lynn are on their way to a Halloween party where Lynn is hoping to snap Jonathan out of his funk by fixing him up with her lovely college friend Tammy (Minka Kelly, currently on TV in Friday Night Lights). While Jonathan is certainly interested in Tammy, he still hears in his head the voice of the Pumpkin Karver, the monster Alec was dressed up as during the murder. Then the Pumpkin Karver appears, and the bodies start piling up...
Jonathan's character is fascinating, and were it presented well, as a high-pressure drama or a thriller instead of the straight horror film Mann and writer Sheldon Silverstein went for, this might have been a real sleeper hit. Unfortunately, they went for the straight horror film. Character development is sacrificed to the (tame) gore effects, leaving us only three halfway-developed characters and a bunch of cardboard cutouts who exist for the purpose of getting killed. Even when we do get some depth to the characters, we get almost no chemistry in their interaction. But even this pales in comparison to the way the big "mystery" angle is handled. I'm not even sure what phrase to hang on the treatment of it-- ham-handed? incompetent? nonexistent?--because the flaws in it are so fundamental and so pervasive that it's almost impossible to approach it from a critical perspective. When I say I really didn't realize the "secret" wasn't supposed to be obvious to us from before the big Halloween party even starts, that's not an exaggeration. It's not just that it's obvious, it's not even disguised, really. And it's not as if Silverstein (The Killing Jar) and Mann (Trapped) haven't done this sort of thing before. They should know how to write a thriller to make the killer a mystery. And yet they fail here, in the largest and gaudiest possible way.
And thus The Pumpkin Karver leaves me more confused than anything else. I can't recommend it, but it does have a certain auto-accident drawing power to it. Once you start watching, it's impossible to stop until you see just how low it can go. **
LONG LIVE BONEDADDY AND SPINNER!!! 
2008-07-11 - For the movie itself, I give 2 stars at best. It is not particularly scary, the plot is very sub-par, and most of the acting is just God-awful. With that said, there are three saving graces: a creepy old man who takes an absurd amount of pride in his ability carve pumpkins, and the two greatest frat/party guy characters I have ever seen in any horror movie: Bonedaddy and Spinner. Their names alone are great enough to rank them highly in ths category, but from the very outset they make it clear they are only interested in booze, drugs, and maybe sex (although they may prefer each other to any female characters in the movie). These two are a constant source of intentional and un-intentional humor, and Bonedaddy's death is one of the greatest I've seen in a horror movie. He is beheaded while taking a drunken piss, and ends up pissing in his own mouth. Spinner's escape leads me to believe that perhaps the directors will make the greatest decision of their lives and make The Pumpkin Karver 2: Spinner's Revenge, full of partying and Bonedaddy-revering.
Good Halloween movie, but could have been so much better without the silly humour and annoying cast. 
2008-07-01 - This film had some truly wonderful, evocative settings for a Halloween movie, just right, but, some of the most annoying, and unappealing and unattractive young people ever to be seen in a horror movie! Witness the stupid manic behaviour and bug-eating activities, boring and silly, and far too long spent on that rubbish when it really wasn't necessary, and ruined what was otherwise a very effective movie for Halloween.
If they had made more of the creepy settings and effects and less of the crap, this movie could have got five stars. It's still well worth seeing, just fast forward past the braindead behaviour of the boring losers whenever they get stuck into a scene if they bore you as much as they did me. An opportunity to make a really effective and eerie movie with such wonderful Halloween atmosphere of the setting and wasted on tired old lunacy and tedious characters who you couldn't care less about! They should have concentrated on the main characters and the unpleasant and menacing old man, and kept the stupid attempts at playing it for laughs out of it.
A Bad Movie
2008-05-19 - If you like watching young adults having sex, this is the film for you. Honestly, it was so bad I turned it off. No plot, no reason why the young man is "haunted" by an unknown pumpkin creature/man, no background is given on the pumpkin creature/man, unless of course it comes later in the movie ... don't bother adding this movie to your collection ... it's not worth a second watch.
