Justin Harding’s Carved, based on the filmmaker’s 2018 short of the same name, falls victim to typical short-turned-feature issues that Brandon Espy’s Mr. Crocket better sidesteps. It's a bite-sized idea in a king-sized wrapper. Hulu's latest "Huluween" treat is stale, dismissively tropey, and cannot sustain its elongated duration. Save for a smattering of body-hacking practical effects, Carved is an unenthusiastic holiday dud that’s not worth its momentary highlights of violent pumpkin-inflicted punishments.
In Cedar Creek Village, an off-the-highway community devastated by a chemical spill years ago, authority figures like Bill (DJ Qualls) and Kevin (Marc-Sully Saint-Fleur) are trying to move forward. UP24 News anchor AJ (Elvis Nolasco, also of Mr. Crocket fame) arrives to cover upcoming Halloween festivities but immediately starts digging into their radioactive past. Bill refuses to acknowledge the incident and diverts attention to Cedar Creek’s pumpkin carving contest. Locals like playwright Kira (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), actor Cody (Corey Fogelmanis), and flutist Maddie (Sasha Mason) all attend the event, assuming wholesome family fun with a $50 cash prize, but instead are put in danger when a particularly rotten pumpkin comes to life, seeking vengeance for its carved-apart comrades.
It’s a very silly premise that lands somewhere between Michael Cooney’s Jack Frost and Jason Eisener’s Treevenge. Harding’s deformed pumpkin puppet chases around anyone who cut eye holes into orangey flesh, fulfilling a revenge arc. Locations are minimal as everything occurs between repurposed barns and the farmland in between, while characters couldn’t be more glaring stereotypes who constantly chase the wrong decision. You’ve seen Carved a billion times, with different actors and villains swapped into roles. That doesn’t have to be a sinking feeling, but familiarity takes a negative connotation in the way Harding’s cinematic vocabulary is frustratingly limited to faint outlines and recycled blueprints.
Harding’s off-color, festering fruit monster is the film’s selling point. It communicates using raptor-like shrieks and can shoot its vines through bodies like Groot. SFX artist Allan Cooke (Dune, Pacific Rim, IT) imagines this plumpy pumpy as an 80s-throwback creature of asinine origins, and there’s enjoyment to be had as townsfolk are dismembered and decapitated by a mutant gourd—but highs are fleeting. Digital effects represent your typical lesser-quality filler, while off-camera edits pan away from the good stuff. It’s the kind of low-budget gore that doesn’t show the violence on screen, and all we see is the prosthetic head tossed into frame by a production PA. There’s blood, stem spikes, and vengeful Jack-O-Lanterns spreading Halloween fear—which grows tiresome since the film has little else to offer.
Carved doesn’t offer much worldbuilding or submersion, wading in shin-high waters. Backstory elements are mentioned in passing and out of sight, like everything involving an apparently catastrophic chemical spillage that births a single predatory pumpkin. Cedar Creek is copy-and-pasted from any Children of the Corn or Dark Harvest rural locale, characterized by a few wooden buildings. Performances are beholden to obvious tropes, whether that’s a not-so-hidden romance or dumbfoundingly stupid actions, like when Maddie risks her life for her woodwind instrument. It’s a one-note gimmick of a movie that doesn’t sell much else, failing to blend its stoner-comedy asides with bumpkin humor like Chris Elliott’s untranslatable Earl, giving the absolute worst, incoherent “countryfolk” accent I’ve ever heard.
Harding and co-writer Cheryl Meyer feel like they’re aiming for CW, young adult demographics, but it’s a tonal miss. Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Corey Fogelmanis are stuck in this lifeless back-and-forth about young lovers who might have to go their own ways. Matty Cardarople tries to provide comedic relief as Clint, a corn-slinger in a corn cob costume, but his troubles with the “Corn Wagon” — that keeps breaking down — go up in smoke. Nobody in the cast shines, held back by rudimentary takes on horror survival scenarios with nothing interesting to add. Despite AJ’s cameraman wearing a Fangoria t-shirt, no one nurtures genre depth. Not even when the killer pumpkin goes meta and turns a corpse into his puppet distraction, which should be weird enough to generate laughter, yet barely registers due to the film’s overall flatlining moods.
Ultimately, Carved is an underwhelming addition to the canon of “deadly objects that shouldn’t be deadly objects” movies. Harding’s autumnal refitting of Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman doesn’t sprout into a seasonal must-watch. Performances are hampered by a shortsighted script, a flimsily linear story that doesn’t evolve past the visual joke of its marketing poster. Save for some gruesome imagery as severed noggins roll around or pushy reporters are hurled into electrical generators, Carved leaves too much to be desired (from a monster pumpkin movie … somehow).
Movie Score: 2/5
Matt Donato is a Los Angeles-based film critic currently published on SlashFilm, Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and anywhere else he’s allowed to spread the gospel of Demon Wind. He is also a member of the Critics Choice Association. Definitely don’t feed him after midnight.
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