My quick rating – 4.3/10. There’s a certain charm to watching someone throw absolutely everything they have at a project, even when the end result leaves you wondering whether you’ve watched a movie or an exceptionally long video game cutscene. Pumpkin Patch is an ambitious, AI-generated feature from Brian James Gage, and while I admire the effort, I’m not entirely convinced the machines have learned how to entertain us just yet.
We open with a digitally animated plane called Scare Force One being chased by flying monkeys. Yes, The Wizard of Oz has apparently declared war on Halloween. Things go sideways, and the President of Halloween crash-lands inside the dreaded prison colony District 13. Even better, her escape pod looks like it was borrowed directly from Escape from New York. I can see BJG is a movie fan. Subtlety, apparently, didn’t make the final cut.
From there, Commander Ichabod Crane, Special Agent Katrina Van Tassel and Robo Bones (the Monster Intelligence Agency’s cybernetic security officer, naturally) enlist a pumpkin-headed vigilante to rescue the President and retrieve a mysterious hexagonal case. Because apparently, even in a world full of monsters, the government still needs some bloke who spends his time getting into bar fights to save the day.
A bar-fight montage introduces our titular hero, and we’re off at a breakneck pace. There are skeletons everywhere, an interesting assortment of creatures, and enough familiar genre nods to keep a movie buff busy. I even caught a little The Warriors in the mix. Honestly, I’m not sure I can keep up with all the references, let alone the story.
That’s partly because Pumpkin Patch feels so incredibly rushed. Scenes zip past before they’ve had much chance to register, and the whole thing has the unmistakable energy of someone racing against a deadline in a computer lab. It’s an impressive project, but I’m not sure I’d call it a film in the traditional sense.
Here’s where we’re heading with completely AI-generated movies. You know that one friend who constantly shares pictures of themselves hanging out with famous celebrities in front of famous landmarks? This movie is essentially the same idea. Ask your AI of choice to put a character in a scene from your favorite movie, repeat until you have enough footage, then call it a feature. The difference is that Gage has actually stitched enough of those scenes together to make an hour-long production, while also handling nearly all the voice acting. That’s a tremendous amount of work for one person.
But here’s my problem. I wasn’t having much fun watching it. The best comparison I can make is an overdrawn video game cutscene, complete with the feeling that I should be holding a controller rather than sitting through another scene.
As an experiment, it’s ambitious and occasionally amusing. As a movie, though, it left me on the fence. I admire the effort, but the technology still has some way to go before assembling a bunch of impressive-looking scenes becomes genuinely entertaining filmmaking.
At least Pumpkin Patch understands the assignment when it comes to #Shocktober. It’s full of Halloween monsters, movie references, and a pumpkin-headed lunatic. I just wish the actual movie had been as entertaining as the idea behind it. Maybe the sequel will take us one step closer to AI’s Hollywood domination.
