Carved
Directed by Justin Harding
Written by Justin Harding and Cheryl Meyer
Starring Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Corey Fogelmanis, Wyatt Lindner
Runtime: 94 minutes
Streaming on Hulu October 21

by Joe Carlough, Staff Writer

What would you do if the pumpkin carving contest you’d intended to participate in ended up being a contest in which you were being carved by a pumpkin? Well, I suspect you’d die. That’s the premise at the heart of Carved, a charming and cheerful teen scream slasher released as part of this year’s annual Huluween celebration. In the movie, we follow a group of teens who are caught overnight at Pumpkinfest on the grounds of the Cedar Creek Pioneer reenactment village. In classic horror movie fashion, a nearby toxic train derailment has led to this year’s festivities being a little…weirder than usual. 

Carved tells the story of Kira, an aspiring playwright, and the cast and crew of the reenactment center, including her Broadway-bound boyfriend, her petulant little brother, a smattering of adults who are helpless in the face of disaster, and some hourly-wage stoners who unwittingly unleash the demon pumpkin upon the masses. As the carving contest begins, the sentient pumpkin witnesses the death of his brethren and begins to unleash hell on the carvers themselves. It’s a pretty fun premise, and the movie really delivers on its kill scenes, with lots of blood spatter, flying body parts, and surprising amounts of gore. 

Carved is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t exceed expectations. The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes who are easy to identify but never move beyond who they are at first sight. The CGI is lackluster and obvious. The acting is fine for what it is, but forgettable. There are a few good quips and sight gags that made me literally LOL, but many of the jokes are tortured and the dialogue often feels tedious and superfluous, killing much of the momentum built during the action sequences. In fact, the storyline feels superfluous to the actual purpose of the movie: to watch a mutant pumpkin monster with tentacle-like vines hunt and kill a few dozen people. For how fun the kill scenes are, we are shown far too few of them. 

This movie lived a previous life as a short film part of the Huluween Film Fest, and it might have been best to leave it as a short. It’s likely there’s just not enough flesh on this pumpkin to make a good jack-o-lantern. But while it might not end up being an annual tradition in our household, watching Carved was a fine way to spend an evening, and sure got me into the Halloween spirit.