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When I think of pumpkin patches, I ALWAYS think of Linus from the Peanuts comic strip, sitting and just waiting for The Great Pumpkin’s arrival. Each and every Halloween night he is disappointed. There is no Great Pumpkin who awards good little children with candy and unlimited presents; however, if you happen to be in North England there is, according to the pitch-perfect slasher Pumpkins, a pumpkin-headed killer that demands blood from a whole lot of trespassing teenagers.
Maybe Linus just had the wrong pumpkin patch? Thankfully, being released from High Octane Pictures this week, Pumpkins and it throwback vibes can now be appreciated by American audiences on VOD.
Pumpkins, written and directed by Maria Lee Metheringham, celebrates the Halloween season with some choice cinematography shots that best express the fall season like few other films in recent memory. There is an art to getting fall and its spooky, expressive nature on film and here, in an independent movie that thrives on creating as suspenseful atmosphere among a woodland setting, we get a very expressive canvas for a whole lot of terror to rollout upon.
And it begins with the untimely death of an old man (Terry Wood) who really, really, REALLY loves his pumpkin patch. He loves them so much that he has his niece Shelly (Maria Lee Metheringham, Mask Of Thorn) give them some super-secret growing juice. Who knows what toxic chemicals are in this fertilizer?! Well, he is about to find out as two goons scare him so badly that he suffers a heart attacks and falls face first into the souped-up fertilizer. {googleads}
After a GREAT credit sequence showcasing what the serum does to the old man, turning him into a towering pumpkin-headed giant (Will Metheringham) with murder on his mind, Pumpkin Man is born and Halloween – at least in North England – will never, ever be the same. With a bloodlust to make even Jason Voorhees jealous, Pumpkin Man terrorizes the rustic setting with one bloody rampage after another.
Heads AND limbs are set rolling down the hillsides as Pumpkin Man slices and dices his way through all sorts of victims who, unfortunately, happen to be in his (or its) way. It begins with the brutal deaths of the two numbskulls who cause the old man to die and then moves on to campers, and to a class of wildlife survivors and their leaders, Denise (Sarah Jayne Curry) and Lance (Roland Martial), who try and fail to keep them alive.
Thing is, once you start messing with the farmer’s land and his pumpkins, well, you are pretty much food for the carrion crow. Even the pumpkins that get carved will gnaw your hand off in this horror flick. That’s pretty fantastical and, yes, badass. The scene is frightfully funny and, thankfully, there are a lot more scenes that are both fun-spirited and gory as hell. The Pumpkin Man will not easily be defeated.
Couple all of this with its witty throwback vibes and its English setting and you have a film that, while not perfect, delivers one hell of a GOURD time.
High Octane Pictures will release Pumpkins to DVD and digital on October 15th.
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[tab title="Film Details"]
MPAA Rating: Unrated.
Runtime: 90 mins
Director: Maria Lee Metheringham
Writer: Maria Lee Metheringham, Will Metheringham
Cast: Dani Thompson, Craig Edwards, Maria Lee Metheringham
Genre: Horror
Tagline: You reap what you sow.
Memorable Movie Quote: "Strange things can happen in these woods."
Distributor: High Octane Pictures
Official Site:
Release Date: October 15, 2019 (Digital & DVD premiere)
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: October 15, 2019
Synopsis: A teen Horror Movie set in the 80's in the North of England.
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