Listen to the following review with the link included below!
Greetings, ghoulies! I’m your host, Dustin J. Fallon, and welcome to another Horror And Sons film review!
Black Pumpkin is a 2018 Halloween-set horror film from writer and director Ryan McGonagle. McGonagle also produced the film, which is a “reimagining” or “alternate version” of a tale he previous told in a 2016 film entitled Bloody Bobby. Although, to be fair, that film did feature a different director. I’ve not watched it, nor does it seem to be available anywhere.
Black Pumpkin, however, was released to VOD and DVD by Uncorked Entertainment and is (as of this writing) currently available to watch on Prime Video, AppleTV, Fandango, and, of course, Tubi.
The film opens to find a retired police officer at home on Halloween night. While the man should rightfully be expecting some trick or treaters, he instead spends his evening in his pajamas, slugging down a bottle of hooch while watching Night of the Living Dead, a film that repeatedly appears on TV screens throughout Black Pumpkin. (I think Plan 9 is in there once as well.) Soon, the man begins to find himself taunted by someone in a Halloween costume repeatedly knocking at his door and running away. As this is nothing more than an opening tease to whet your blood-thirsty appetite, the sequence ends with not only the man dead, but his teenage daughter as well.
After the opening credits roll, we learn that 10 years have passed before being introduced to the first of Black Pumpkin‘s lead characters; Laurie, a fairly normal teenage girl plotting and planning for her school’s Halloween dance the following evening. The fact that the character is named “Laurie” is surely not coincidental and a tad worthy of eye-rolls.
*The character of “Laurie” is portrayed by actress Ellie Patrikios, who’s also appeared in something called Santa Stole Our Dog: A Merry Doggone Christmas! It has to be noted that McGonagle seems to have an obsession with Patrikios’ ass as it is prominently displayed walking around in thin-cut, lacey panties multiple times. Naturally, I had no objections to this aspect. None whatsoever. I can’t say that it helped advance the story any, but it surely didn’t hurt the film either.
However, Laurie’s plans are about to be squashed when her mother informs her that she has to take her little sister, Regan (again, probably not a coincidence), trick-or-treating instead. Meanwhile, her brother, Elliot (Dogen Eyeler), is busy working on his own school project; a video essay on the legends and rumors surrounding “Diablo’s Den”, an allegedly haunted or otherwise “evil” spot in his hometown of Fall Creek Valley. As Elliot puts it, it’s the setting for “pretty much every talltale and campfire story” in Fall Creek Valley’s history. Really, it’s nothing more than a small hill with some trees on it. You can see roads in the background and I pretty sure those drivers can see you as well.
Assisting Elliot with his project is his best friend, Lawrence; better known as “Porkchop” (Grayson Thorne Kilpatrick – Netflix’s “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story”, The End of Oak Street) Porkchop is a redheaded kid with glasses, a speech impediment, and some extra weight. As such, he finds himself the subject of bullying, primarily from a pair of delinquent brothers who just happen to be “friends of friends” with Laurie. The concept of bullying is conveyed by having the brothers chase Porkchop from “Diablo’s Den,” where he was nailing fake voodoo dolls to trees for use in the video project, all the way to Laurie’s doorstep. Yes, that’s the extent of its development. Well, other than throwing the occasional mean-spirited joke, negative comment, or demeaning stereotype the character’s way. As this chase sequence does last for an overly extended period, it gives Porkchop time to encounter Alex, a seemingly crazy man who warns him that the “Den” is home to a “Bloody Bobby”, and to stay safe the next few days. Granted, he doesn’t explain who Bobby is or why Porkchop need watch his back.
After presenting their finished project to their class, the boys learn from their teacher that Alex has spent the last decade attempting to warn anyone who would listen about the legend of “Bloody Bobby”, an allegedly demonic presence that he claims resides in Diablo’s Den. However, despite sharing glaring similarities in costume design and demeanor with Trick r’ Treat‘s “Sam”, Bloody Bobby is reduced to little more than the vengeful spirit of a bullied child who mysteriously vanished some 30 years prior, which kinda ranks him lower on the scale of “evil scary things”. It’s should (arguably) also make his path of vengeance a little more focused, which is not the case here.
Wherever Bloody Bobby resides, it’s clearly not in the first half of the film as he hasn’t been seen since the opening sequence. When he does finally resurface, he starts his bloodbath by taking out a quartet of secondary characters. Granted, these kids were trying to make us believe that they were getting drunk off of O’Doul’s, so they probably deserved what they got. As Bobby was bullied for his nose bleeds, his victims suffer one shortly before their demise. In many films, this might serve as something of a “tell”, telegraphing an impending scare. Well, it’s no different here. As such, it’s no surprise when any of these secondary characters die. That’s the whole purpose of secondary characters in horror films: to serve as fodder. To help prove this point, another secondary character is killed off soon after.
Halloween night arrives and the boys have another encounter with Alex, who now urges them to return home and to lock their doors. However, this is really about all that happens for about a half-hour span, which does drag the pacing back down to a leisurely stroll, if not a drunken crawl. However, things significantly ramp up once Bloody Bobby shows up at the house to torment the boys, as well any other other surviving characters. While nothing in Black Pumpkin is particular gory, with most dismemberment and disembowelment happening just off-screen, this sequence does feature one particularly goopy death. Naturally, this is followed by a one-liner from another character, which I admittedly chuckled at.
The night ends with Bloody Bobby not exactly stopped and able to return to wreak havoc another Halloween. Which he does. Black Pumpkin concludes with a somewhat tacked-on “final scare” as Bloody Bobby returns to claim one more victim. However, it’s stated on-screen that this sequence takes place in “present day”. As the film released in 2018 and its characters state that it’s taking place in 2018, this “present day” would then have to be the “future” of at least 2019. Which, ya know, is technically now the past. Either way, it feels completely unnecessary, while also complicating and contradicting Bloody Bobby’s motives and origins.
Black Pumpkin is not the best Halloween-themed horror film that you’ll find out there. That one is called Halloween. Hell, I’m not sure it’s even in the upper half. The film definitely has some flaws. While not unbearably painful to watch, some of the performances are a little uneven, with the child actors actually seeming to get better as the film progresses. Supporting characters are thinly developed and fairly generic, but that’s nothing new for B-grade horror films or even some A-grade ones, for that matter. Even the mythology surrounding “Bloody Bobby” isn’t exactly so exciting and new. All in all, it’s really nothing unique or particularly inventive. You’ve seen all these pieces before, but maybe not arranged in this fashion.
I do understand that Black Pumpkin is a low-budgeted affair, and in low-budget filmmaking, you sometimes have to use what is available. This said, some of the incidental music is fucking awful. The rest is some synthy sounding bullshit that, while truthfully not bad, sounds identical to the synthy stuff you’ve heard in multiple other films inspired by Carpenter’s 1978 classic. There’s also repeated use of a fake commercial for something called “Dr. Frank’s Ghoul Butter Zombie Bars” that’s sang somewhat to the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”. I’m sure the filmmaker found this sequence to be humorous or amusing. It’s not. It’s just annoying.
As with many similar films, there’s definitely some “filler” early in Black Pumpkin that probably could have been excised. This includes a rather pointless sequence of Laurie and her friends in gym class. The sequence features little dialog, adds nothing to the plot, and only serves to pad the film’s runtime, which does no favors for the often laborious pacing.
All this said, I still found Black Pumpkin to be fairly enjoyable. It definitely doesn’t nail the Halloween mood or aesthetics like Trick r’ Treat (Not much does, and this is coming from someone who’s really not the biggest fan of that film), but whether intentional or not, its 80’s horror vibes felt far less forced that I find them to be in many of the numerous other Halloween-themed films that have released over the last 10-15 years, which either aren’t one bit reminiscent of the decade for people who actually lived through more than 2 years of it, or try to stuff countless references in, forgetting to question if they actually fit together. Shit, even the amount of denim on display in Black Pumpkin doesn’t feel forced, and for a film from 2018, there’s quite a bit.
More importantly, I generally found the characters of Elliot and Porkchop to be interesting. More so Porkchop, as the character not only delivers Black Pumpkin‘s best lines of dialogue, but tends to be more charismatic than Elliot. This said, it is disappointing to see the character’s weight issues treated as something of a “punchline” all the way up until the film’s final moments.
To some degree, it’s kind of a shame that Black Pumpkin did not release in the 1980s. The film seems like something I would have watched more than once had it aired on HBO, quite like a few other films of that era that I really don’t enjoy all that much. Kinda like Monkey Shines or Jason Takes Manhattan. No, it’s not something that I see becoming a staple in anyone’s annual Halloween watch lists, but I definitely didn’t leave the film regretting the time spent.
McGonagle has since released another film, Legend of Fall Creek, which is yet another “re-envisioning” of his “Bloody Bobby” tale. Third time’s the charm? Maybe? Don’t ask me. I haven’t watched that one either.
