Pumpkins

To make a decent horror movie you don't actually need a decent budget. You need a decent script, you need decent actors and - more than anything else - you need a decent talent behind the camera who know how to utilise all the tricks of cinema to generate and maintain suspence, tension, mood, atmosphere and - above all - tension.

Pumpkins has none of these things.

What starts with a set-up that might have worked if played as a comedy but is instead played dead straight, proceeds to follow up the lack of jokes with a lack of anything you want from a horror movie. It doesn't even have a decent ending - it just ends with no sense of resolution or even a final confrontation. Another character gets killed off, many more still alive, we get a few shots of night time roads and then ... it ends. No idea what the heck that was supposed to be - the only thing I can guess at is that they were shooting it in order and then ran out of budget so just stopped.

There isn't a single redeeming feature to this film. Utterly astonishing in quite how bad it is.

If you are looking for low budget horror, everyone involved has made better movies - search out their IMDb profiles and find something better there. Literally anything will do; this is the career low point of everyone involved.

Living in a remote English village, a group of hooligans manages to upset the owner of a prize-winning pumpkin patch enough to kill him only to have his feed mix with his blood to become a deformed, mutated monstrous killer who runs wild through the area forcing the locals to try to stop him.

This one was a pretty decent indie slasher. One of the strongest aspects here is the rather intriguing storyline about the connection between the killer and his love for the pumpkins he grows. As we're immediately dropped into the life he and his daughter live on the farm where they tend to grow them on a near-continuous basis that upsets the band of local hooligans that sets off the reaction within the film, it's exceptionally economic as that's all explained within the first minutes of the film. That setup manages to serve the actual slashing scenes quite nicely as the reanimated killer heads out to stalk and kill the various members around the woods. From the ambush on the hooligans around their home to the stellar stalking of the couple stranded off the road nearby and the later scenes out in the woods, there are some fine indie-flavored scenes here that promote the sudden shock appearance of the killer over drawn-out suspense sequences. When he turns his attention to the hikers out in the woods, this one turns into a much more engaging effort with the killer able to psychically control pumpkins to move around and attack on their own in addition to heading out on his own to chop the citizens up who go traipsing through the woods. Overall, these here are what make this one a somewhat enjoyable indie slasher effort. This one does have a few flaws with it. One of the main issues is that for a premise this flimsy it's expected to have a ridiculous setup that shows the punks as having no realistic or credible motivation for instigating things as they do. That they're so infuriated with him simply for his owning land that they don't comes off as laughable and completely unrealistic, especially with so little time to get to know why they're acting like that or what their previous history with the farm is really about, that this whole backstory serves merely as a pretext for unleashing the killer and not caring about the protagonists who do so as it's all done at the expense of explaining anything. The other real issue to be had here is the limitations served on it by the lack of budget available. Despite a crisp running time, this one seemed to indulge in useless padding including continuous jokes at the expense of the inexperienced hikers who are more accustomed to city life than being out in the woods or an excruciating song being played over-and-over in the tavern she runs to for help. These are way too long for a film like this and don't have many purposes being here in a story such as this. As well, despite the high body-count much of the gore is off-screen with just the aftermath showed or filmed in a manner as to hide the actual mode of death with just blood splatter or dripping from the victims' mouth that contributes to the cheap and cheesy feel of this one. On the whole, these issues are what hold the film down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Language and Graphic Violence.

It's definitely not a work of art, and it shows the lack of a budget pretty much 100% of the time, but I think some of the reviews are being a bit cruel. It's a fun time waster, and it's free on Tubi, so if a dumb slasher called "Pumpkins" about a killer farmer then why not check it out?

This is not a good movie. They blew the entire budget on buying good reviews on small websites and also on hiring that one famous chick to be in the bar.

Be cause of this sad reality, a large portion of the movie is boring people walking around the woods boringly, and then getting attacked or killed off camera so they didn't have to pay for special effects. Supposedly there were killer pumpkins being controlled by the uninteresting antagonist, but you won't see a single one of these bad boys do anything other than sit there and be a pumpkin.

It finally ramps up near the end, I guess, but then subsequently and rather suddenly (and rather thankfully) the movie turns itself off for you, preventing you from suffering any further.

I am giving it an extra star, boosting it to 2 stars, because at one point I laughed at the guy and his tent.

This movie appears to have been written by a group of eight year olds attempting to make a scary movie, but can't agree on what should happen. One of them got his older brother to film it with mom's iphone, because he's a ninth grader. The writing is awful, the acting is comical, the props came from Party City, and the majority of what i can guess was about $200 budget was spent on the killer's mask and the beer they drank at the wrap party. They must have ran out of money after they filmed the pub scenes because the film just abruptly ends with no explanation of why the killer killed some people and left others to live. I laughed through most of the movie. I went into it not knowing anything about it and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. If you enjoy films that are trying to be serious but just come off as comedy this is perfect for you. Do not go into this film expecting to see the next great classic in the slasher genre.