Still, if you were to take a look through our list of watched movies (and we do keep one), you might have eager expectations for an upcoming review of, say, Troll 2. The Internet needs yet another commentary on that one, am I right?
Or maybe you've been waiting with bated breath for our take on Samurai Cop or Miami Connection. Hey, we're "against the ninja" as much as anyone, and enjoyed all these infamous films quite a bit -- but nope, no reviews from us.
We're just not that keen on rehashing things others have already said a dozen times, or adding our voice to a well-established chorus. Give us an opportunity to shed light on something that's been overlooked, however, and we're all ears. (Or eyes, or fingers, or whatever the metaphor should be.)
And if that something has received almost no coverage, but the coverage it's gotten has been (in our opinion) unjustly negative? Then game on, friends, game on.
Grade: B-
Do you like going to flea markets? (Or rather, did you, before this whole pandemic thing?)
Because we do, you see. Thrift stores and yard sales can be great, but a well-run flea market on a good day is a treasure trove of possibilities, worth driving hours to visit. You never know what you might find there: turn a corner and suddenly, the exact thing you've been looking for is sitting right on someone's table, staring you in the face. (That's happened to us twice so far.)
There's one flea market in particular, a really big outdoor one, that's given us some of our most cherished possessions. We've been there well over 20 times, though over the years it's gone a bit downhill -- at least for us -- through no fault of its own: things change, and the LPs people were once practically giving away for 50 cents apiece are now $5 each.
So it was on a spring day -- sometime in June, most likely -- that we found ourselves at loose ends, having combed through the tables and found little of interest. Having traveled many miles to get there, though, we weren't inclined to leave empty-handed.
One of us hit up a vendor selling DVDs, and grabbed a few random cheap discs that looked interesting. (Incidentally this may well have been the same table that, years before, gave us Grit 'n Perseverance and thereby our beloved Beartooh.)
Among those cheapies was a film we'd never ever heard of, called Pink Pumpkins at Dawn. Normally we don't go for recent productions, and odds seemed high that this was some sort of Hallmark Channel, straight-to-video, Christian-themed, "family-friendly entertainment"...
...but then again, the cover does have a guy (Chris Gunn) sporting a teenstache, jean jacket, and baseball cap, holding a gun to his own head. So you never know, right?
And so Pink Pumpkins sat on our shelf month after month, unopened -- another entry on that long list of "movies we might watch someday". That is, if we could get the name right: even though the oddball title was a big part of what attracted P. in the first place, he kept misremembering it as Pink Peppercorns at Dawn.
(That would probably be a very different film -- starring an officious Geoffrey Zakarian as the only thing standing between us and a world of truffle oil, balsamic vinegar, and fair pay.)
But after a couple years, "someday" came at last, the shrinkwrap was removed, and we sat down to watch Pink Pumpkins at Dawn. It's always refreshing to watch a film or read a book you know nothing about -- no plot summary, no ordained spot in the cultural zeitgeist, no sense of the film's Importance or lack thereof.
If you were a precocious child, you might have had the experience of cracking open a book from your parents' library, something right at the edge of your ability to comprehend, and just reading without the feeling of that inner critic perennially observing over your shoulder:
"Is this good or bad? Is this just a bunch of clichés? Am I supposed to respond in a certain, knowing way, aware of the work's shortcomings and therefore unmoved by it? How does my response to this work affect my social standing and sense of self?"
Maybe you liked it, maybe you didn't, but you trusted the author to be doing something of value to someone. You were, in short, a sponge, not a judge -- just as a kid should be.
(Kudos to Penn and Teller for retaining -- or appearing to retain, but we think it's genuine -- their childlike enthusiasm for magic despite knowing so much about what the men and women behind the curtain are up to.)
Pink Pumpkins at Dawn is a hard film to talk about because there isn't much plot, and yet almost anything concrete we might say is likely to tread in spoiler territory. (We strongly recommend against reading the blurb on the back of the DVD, or even watching through the footage that plays underneath the menu at the beginning.)
We suppose the first thing that struck us was the unexpectedly poor quality of the DVD transfer. It's certainly watchable but was clearly taken from VHS, and not an especially good one at that, with washed-out colors and general fuzziness. We're used to that kind of thing from Mill Creek, but weren't expecting it from what appears to be an authorized release.
(Bizarrely, the footage underneath the menu looks dramatically cleaner and brighter -- as though it was taken from the original film elements, while the main feature was just lifted from VHS. Here's a comparison, which leaves unanswered the obvious question: why on earth?)
We have a fondness for movies where very little happens, because movies like that tend to lavish their attention instead on atmosphere, character, and conjuring a sense of time and place. Pink Pumpkins at Dawn is one of those -- and boy, does it capture what it was like to be a certain kind of teenager in the northeastern U.S. in the late 20th century. (Maybe the 21st, too.)
The anger, alienation, and aimlessness of its characters is intensely familiar to us -- not just the bare facts of those things, but the way the characters express them, the choices they make, and the seeming inevitability with which they're drawn toward disaster.
And there's also the Peter Pan bus. If you've got Peter Pan in your movie, you've got the Northeast.
In the vanishingly small amount of coverage that Pink Pumpkins at Dawn received, the main criticism seems to be the psychological implausibility of a key part of its storyline. We won't deny that we had trouble with this too, and even audibly objected to it.
On the other hand, life is full of little rabbit holes, moments where time seems suspended and everything can turn unexpectedly -- and whose very departure from the expected makes us act in unexpected ways, because instead of living in long predictable arcs, we're responding solely to the gravity of the present moment.
We often expect a film to feel orchestrated, as if every thread is not just purposeful but inevitable, and every event the relentless outcome of preordained elements and character traits. In some ways, that's a very childlike expectation -- asking the movie to reaffirm for us not just the purposefulness of the universe, but that of our own sense of self.
And yet, everything in our lives, good and bad, is the product of chance meetings: a corner turned, an Internet ad answered, brakes hit in time or a moment too late. And every day people who X, a quality that would seem to exclude Y, nevertheless do Y. Are we ourselves so far behind?
From what we can tell, Pink Pumpkins at Dawn began filming in 1996, may have been complete by 1997 or 1998, got shopped around to film festivals in 2000 (getting a terrible and spoiler-heavy review from Variety), and made it to VHS in 2001. Our DVD gives the release year as 2002 but also has an art and design credit for 2004, which is when the disc came out on the IFDP label.
IFDP stands for "Interesting Films, Different Perspectives", and seems to be a sub-brand of Ariztical Entertainment, which describes itself as "one of the leading names in quality LGBT, independent and art house films". Their current content seems almost exclusively LGBT-oriented, making Pink Pumpkins at Dawn, with no LGBT aspect at all, seem like an odd fit. Indeed it now seems to have vanished from their site (though Archive.org has its catalog page from 2012).
(Ergo: Ariztical chose, in the most literal sense, to "give up the pumpkins". Put that on somethin'.)
All this leads us to a very odd connection, one that we wouldn't otherwise have made if we hadn't watched River's Edge recently. Both Pink Pumpkins and River's Edge depict working-class teenagers and their anomie, and it's hard to imagine that the 1986 film wasn't an influence on Pink Pumpkins.
One weird coincidence, though, is that both films prominently feature a foul-mouthed kid wearing a Canadian tuxedo, brandishing a pistol, and on the brink of shooting someone. And both were played by an actor who -- if we're not mistaken -- later came out as gay. (We can't seem to find the link, but feel 99% sure that we read something to that effect about Mr. Gunn; if we're incorrect, please let us know.)
Of course that's why they call it "acting", but still, it's impressive to see Chris Gunn so completely inhabit the character of a pissed-off, grungy, rednecky (in the Northeastern U.S. sense of the word), sexually frustrated teenage boy of the stereotypically hetero sort.
Another, far freakier coincidence: as you might expect from a film involving teenage boys and guns, the possibility of a school shooting is floated pretty hard at one point -- as, for example, in this dialogue between two minor characters, which surely establishes that Pink Pumpkins ain't family-friendly entertainment:
"I was watching this talk show. There was this kid on there, went to school one day. Leaves, gets a gun, comes back and blows away like three people...He said he just got so pissed off at everyone. No one was listening. He's famous now!"
"That's it, man! I mean, you can spend your whole life being good and no one will even know you were on the fuckin' planet. But you fuck up royally, man, you are set for life."
Nothing too unusual there, except that Pink Pumpkins at Dawn is set in western Connecticut, with much of it filmed in Newtown -- which, after all, is where Sandy Hook Elementary is.
We don't hold up Pink Pumpkins at Dawn up as a masterpiece; it's hard to imagine that the director himself (Rick Oronato) would do so. It's simply a moment in time -- if you can call 90 minutes a "moment in time" -- that held us fast and gave us something we didn't expect. It's independent, regional filmmaking of a kind that's probably gone for good (and ought to be mourned), and it was only through the happy accident of a chance meeting that we got to see it at all.
It's a film that deserves to be remembered as more than the sum of its plot points, even if few will have the patient, forgiving attitude -- or attention span -- necessary to appreciate its virtues. And it at least deserves to get a real transfer from the original 16mm film elements, not just this criminally lazy VHS dump.
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