By Geno McGahee
I am a huge fan of scarecrow movies and most scarecrow movies are the same…for some reason. Usually, a scarecrow is used as a tool of revenge. They are connected to one of the characters…sort of like PUMPKINHEAD. The 2004 low budget horror movie “JACK O’LANTERN” is a scarecrow movie, I guess. I’m not really sure because the killing force is never seen hanging in a field anywhere. I assume he must be because he has the characteristics.
I don’t really focus on taglines, but to give you an idea of what sort of film this is, I will. “Vengeance shows no mercy” is plastered on the cover art and it is one of the lamest taglines I’ve ever seen. They felt that they needed another tagline and came up with “evil lives in everything.” A horror film is supposed to have that tagline that grabs you… I felt going in that this film may be piss-poor because the taglines were so terrible.
Jack (Dave R. Watkins) is a slow guy that has some people in his life that aren’t too nice. Things change when he carves a pumpkin that is filled with blood. A creature with a pumpkin head is going around killing the bad guys and it’s all being seen by Jack. He awakens from a trance after it happens in shock. That is the entire story. There is no character development or any real story here. They just had an idea…an incredibly unoriginal idea…but an idea nonetheless and went with it. Unfortunately, there was nothing else going on. None of the other characters mattered and the dialogue didn’t push the story forward.
We also had a strange family in the beginning that was right out of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE that never really figured in. The film borrows heavily from PUMPKINHEAD, and that’s OK, but they did it so poorly that it’s almost unwatchable. I trudge through it, waiting to see the monster and unfortunately, it wasn’t much to be excited about. I didn’t expect much…so it wasn’t really a big deal, but after all this wait, I was hoping for something more. The mask reminded me of the mask in PSYCHO SCARECROW, but at least that was entertaining.
JACK O’LANTERN has that great look of those horror films that were everywhere in the early 2000s, but despite that charming look, it doesn’t have anything to keep the viewer interested. Borrowing heavily from PUMPKINHEAD, but also taking ideas from I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, it’s obvious that the writer had no idea how to write and just pasted together the ideas from others to make this film. I’m not against unoriginal horror movies if they’re good. This one was bad.
Watch at your own risk. It’s not the worst movie I’ve seen, but I recommend that you pass on this title.
Rating: 2/10
