Picture bright orange pumpkins tumbling out of the back of a delivery truck in front of you, bouncing on the pavement, and boomeranging up on your car hood, as you negotiate the dodgy early morning rush hour traffic, on your daily trek to work. This happened (literally) yesterday at 6 AM on I-696, in Farmington Hills, a suburb of Metropolitan Detroit.
Yet one has to ask, how could the delivery truck back door have burst open? News footage from Channel 7 WXYZ in Detroit shows reporter Malcolm Maddox, who looks like he is enjoying himself, with a very torn up truck still brimmed with pumpkins. That is, it looks like the company overfilled the truck with orange gourds, which simply broke the bolts of the door off from the sheer weight of the seasonal fruit.
Well, we’ll have to wait for an official inquiry as to why this odd accident occurred, and no less than five days before Halloween. I’m a trifle superstitious, so maybe I’m reading too much into this freak misadventure (fruity smashup), but there is a Paranormal Activity Part 4 quality to it (me thinks). And Stephen King would have a field day with the pumpkin debacle.
Naturally enough, it would make a cool Drive-In movie, if we still had any Drive-Ins in existence these days. The title would be Attack of the Killer Pumpkins, and so the orange gourds would come alive and ravage the city of Detroit, take over city hall, and capture the mayor and the entire hierarchy of the Motor City, conquer all the skyscrapers, and eat-up all the vittals in the city.
So I’ll need to refine the script somewhat, but we have a rough draft, so let’s start shooting next week so we it can premiere our extravaganza at next year’s Cannes Film Festival. I don’t charge as much as Stephen King, so we might even make a profit. Come to think of it, we could model the rogue-rebel-humanized pumpkins after the viral social movement, Occupy Wall Street.
Pumpkin rights are a proper theme for a population of gourds who have been persecuted and smashed to pieces at frat parties, apple bobbings, or otherwise, freeway fiascos where semi-trucks pulverize the dumbo-like crooked melons.
But maybe the B-movie would have better box office attendance if we made the People-Pumps more like the evil pigs in Orville’s Animal Farm, who in turn modeled the porkers after the leaders of The Russian Revolution, such as Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky. Then it would be more of a parable of horror, or just what could happen if a major city was taken over by a tyrannical horde of communist pumpkins.
We need to return to the unsavory details of spilling pumpkins attacking a busy Michigan freeway. Is the driver responsible? Or is it the delivery company? Were they trying to cut costs by overloading the truck? Was anyone hurt? At least one windshield was shattered, I heard. Okay, so the tangible evidence is way too prosaic for our hungry imaginations. Are there any groovy iPhone videos of the smashing pumpkins on YouTube yet?
