2024, Movies

Carved (2024, Justin Harding)

Aka Octopumpkin. (I mean Sextopumpkin. Or Quintopumpkin.)

The people who wrote this don’t appear to have been alive in 1993 or at least weren’t old enough to remember how people act or talk. Nobody would have turned a camcorder on themselves back then – I know, we have home movies and my dad isn’t in any of them. There’s talk of “consent” and other things that feel extremely 21st century. There’s a musical at the historic village which feels very Glee and absolutely not 1993. There’s open talk of weed and smoking on the job. None of this feels authentic to 1993. I suspect that this film would have been less bad, to me, if it had managed in any way to capture 1993.

This is one of those horror movies where we’re not sure what the rules are. This, um, “pumpkin,” can use its tentacles to pierce someone’s skull and go through the ground but it can’t go through an old board in a barn? It also maybe can fly because I don’t know how else it gets on that van. (Are we supposed to believe it ran? It never runs the rest of the movie. It’s like one of those slow-walking serial killers.)

A film like this needs to lean into its ridiculousness. But too often this film is played straight with the comedy coming from lines rather than sight gags or plays on convention, to the extent there are actual laughs. And there are sight gags, most of them just don’t land. The actors are all in a serious film. That could work if the film around them weren’t so mediocre, but the film around them features a giant, tentacled gourd of some kind which is not funny or scary.

I think I laughed twice. Maybe three times. I’m not sure. Mostly I was bored. I did find the movie got a little bit better as it went along, as fewer characters were around. But that was relative. One thing I can say is that at least their “Earlier that day” thing didn’t come from the end of the movie, it came from the middle, and quite early in the middle. I guess that’s some kind of narrative innovation.

3/10

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