Horror...Comedy?

Oh dear. Halloween is drifting closer, so my natural inclination is to drift closer to all that scary media I love so much. With an emphasis on the bad perhaps, but isn't it so much more fun to write about BAD things rather than good? I think so at least...

My initial hope was to plunge right into the world of H.P. Lovecraft, who might be, by default, my favorite author. He certainly might be my favorite American author; for a pulp writer, the man is fully worthy of any number of essays on my part (how Lovecraft's literary weaknesses were his strengths, how he fashioned a truly unique style that can't ever quite be replicated, why his Cthulhu mythos are the perfect way to create a fictional set of myths). But that's for another day. You'll have to tide yourselves over with this limerick I composed earlier this evening:
 

There once was a man named HP

Who was deathly afraid of the sea

Wrote cosmic horror dreams

Ate all kinds of ice creams

And hated each ethnicity.

That was the man in a nutshell.

But then...oh then...I saw The Pumpkin Karver (2006). And my plans changed.

Boo!

You can tell it's going to be a good movie when there's no one's name on the cover...and the monster on the cover isn't even in the film...

There are way too many amazing things in this film to even bother talking about. Amazing, by the way, means shitty. There is the:

• Dick boyfriend who is clearly a 30 year old playing an 18 to 19 year old who "scores a [single] beer" for a Halloween party. 
• The OTHER dick boyfriend dressed as a sulky pirate.  
• The fat kid dressed as the Hulk...because that's exactly what he'd dress as even if he wasn't in a shitty movie. 
• Tons of chicks using Halloween as an excuse to dress and act like sluts (dig the zany "touch me, no, just take pictures" scene!), as well as spout some of the most childish dialogue ever written (dig the Charlie's Angels scene).
• The "I can carve a pumpkin in the amount of time it takes most people to blow their nose" scene.
• And more bad acting than you shake a stick at. 

Suffice to say that the only characters I ended up caring about throughout the entire movie were two highly irritating stoner kids in togas...mainly because they seemed like the only type of people in the whole movie I'd consider hanging out with. Actually, the pair kind of reminded me of me and my friend Johnny when we'd get drunk in alleyways...

Anyway, the basic plot seems to revolve around this kid who's just really, really into carving pumpkins. He lives with his sister, and no parents. One must imagine that he's replaced the lack of parental love with pumpkin carving, because, as I said, he's really, REALLY into it. There is foreshadowing, and there is more-shadowing, and this movie is guilty of it all.

Dick boyfriend number one shows up on Halloween to prank the sister but good, acting out a long "I'm a slasher" kind of prank...you know, just an innocent prank. The kind you carry on with a knife, a girl in a bathrobe, a locked garage, and ten free minutes on your hands. The lil' bro (whom IMDB informs me is named "Jonathan")  comes in and saves her by STABBING THE BOYFRIEND REPEATED IN THE FACE WITH A CARVING KNIFE. Hmm...that might be important.

One year later, sister (Lynne) has absolutely forgotten ole what's-his-face, but Jonathan hasn't. She tries to cheer him up by taking him to a Halloween party on a farm, which happens to be a pumpkin farm, full of people they don't really seem to know. The owner of the farm is some kind of crazy old man, who needs special mention:

Giving a new meaning to "old man smell."

He honestly does need special mention, because all of dialogue is extremely overwritten "beatnik philosopher" meets "insane dairy farmer" hash. The most glowing example I can recall is: "The evil sticks in your mind like jowels full of taffy," or something like that. 

Naturally, when people start showing up being STABBED REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE WITH CARVING KNIVES...in a PUMPKIN PATCH, everyone assumes its the old man instead of the kid who has already proven that he's strangely attracted to both stabbings and pumpkins. Hilarity ensues.

Oh yes, I quite mean that. Hilarity ensues. See, this is what I've meant to be talking about all along; there seems to be a trend in the horror movie industry to create low budget "horror comedies." An odd, paradoxical breed perhaps, but a breed that has been with the film industry since the start. Hell, it's been a part of the horror genre since the genre was actually codified (Poe, arguably THE codifier of American horror, wrote parodies of his own style far more often than most people realize).

So what's so bad about horror comedies? Nothing perhaps. In fact, I can talk about a halfway decent horror comedy I saw not that long ago...but first, I'll have to bring up the movie that started me thinking about this subject to begin with. But this thing's too long already, and attention spans tend to be sadly short. I feel a part two coming on...