Night of the Pumpkin (short film review)

A quick review of a short Halloween film that premiered over on Fangoria this past week:

The acting?  Lame.  The dialogue?  Stilted at best.  But that still doesn't spoil the fun of Night of the Pumpkin, a 17-minute short directed by Frank Sabatella and scripted by Ted Geoghegan.  Tongues are definitely pressed into cheeks in this tale of a demon-possessed pumpkin that goes rampaging like a Muppet from Hell as it is driven by an insatiable appetite for human flesh (I loved the scene when the delinquent knocking jack-o-lanterns off of their fence-post perch gets a snap on the wrist).  If all this sounds campy, wait until you get to the castration scene, where coitus is gorily interrupted and a guy's genitalia ends up poking from the pumpkin's saw-toothed rictus like some lurid cigar.  Perhaps the film's true highlights, though, are (cue the Joe Bob Briggs accent) a pair of naked breasts and some cool animation during the opening credits.

As brain food, Night of the Pumpkin is about as nutritious as a chocolate bar, but hell, the filmmakers weren't gunning for profundity here.  This low-brow short is the perfect way to pass the time as you gobble down the remainder of your Halloween candy.