What Are They Doing to Those Pumpkins?

Long-time readers will know that I want more romance movies for every occasion. Give me your Halloween romance, your Hannukah romance, your Every Holiday romance. But I'm not the only one befuddled by the lack of Thanksgiving romances. The holiday has all the small-town and extended family hijinks that a Hallmark movie could want, plus the opportunity for sexy cooking scenes and second-chance romance. But for whatever reason, Thanksgiving rom-coms are thin on the ground. Last year I reviewed Pumpkin Pie Wars, so this year I decided to stick with the theme and review Growing the Big One, a 2010 movie starring...Shannon Doherty?

I'll just say it: this town is weirdly horny for pumpkins. This year, the annual pumpkin contest inexplicably has a cash prize of $25k, which will then be matched by the Guinness Record book if they can beat the record for biggest pumpkin. So there's 50 grand on the line for this pumpkin contest, which seemed really high to me until I googled it and found thata contest in California paid over $22k for last year's winning pumpkin and puts a $30k bounty on breaking the world record.This was not the first time I scoffed at a pumpkin fact as presented in this movie, and then googled it and discovered that, in fact, the pumpkin facts in this movie are actually pretty solid. I guess it shouldn't surprise me, given how much the characters in this movie love their pumpkins. Emma's grandfather, who called his pumpkins his "orange ladies," left behind a pumpkin diary that is encoded with poetry. One poem reads "She's hungry for your kiss. Feed her with the bounty of your being." Maybe I've been writing dirty books for too long, but, uhhhhhhhhh, what exactly are you feeding those pumpkins? Later, another character complains, "this year, Russell's completely lost interest in me. He's only interested in the orange hotties in the garden." Ma'am, your husband is cheating on you with the whole pumpkin patch and you need to get checked for root rot.