Is it Christmas yet?

Halloween decorations down by the end of the weekend. Then, happiness!

It’s Halloween! I challenge you to make the most of it! Go trick-or-treating! Go trunk-or-treating! Bob for apples! Watch the Elm Street series in its entirety! Sacrifice owls!

The weather here is perfect: Gloomy, grey and inoffensively chilly. I haven’t checked the forecast, but judging by the wind and clouds, it wouldn’t surprise me to be completely underwater by 9 PM. My kingdom for a thunder clap.

Tonight, we’re heading to a friend’s house to drink and eat our way through a pile of scary DVDs that would stack taller than Andre, all while carving pumpkins with designs that are certain to be obscene. It’s the last hurrah for horror, and it’s hard to imagine that by this time tomorrow, I’ll be waist deep in red-and-green Sunday circulars, fifty times more excited that I am now. There are four quarters in the year, and people, we’re living in the only one that matters.

So ends the Halloween Countdown — thanks again for continuing to make the site worth keeping alive, and I hope your howliday is a good one! Course, if you’re stuck home with nothing to do, you could always relive this year’s creepy content, conveniently linked below!

We’ve got a few hours to kill, because our little party is sure to last until tomorrow afternoon, and if we show up too early, we’ll be unconscious by midnight. I’ve been waiting for trick-or-treaters, but none have arrived. Not a single one. I’m aghast that we’ve scared society into ditching one of its greatest traditions, but on the other hand…more Twizzlers for me.

Normally, we just combine assorted candies into Ziploc bags to give to trick-or-treaters, but Target was selling these awesome boxes of full-sized Twizzlers varieties for ten bucks. Couldn’t resist. I’m so anxious to hear a knock on our door, because giving retail-sized candies to trick-or-treaters is sure to make me the hero of the neighborhood. Alas, nobody has come. Maybe it was a bad idea to decorate the front lawn in a dead ferret motif.

In the comments, discuss your Halloween adventures! Don’t know what kind of computer access I’m going to have by tonight, but if there’s any, I’ll pop by with drunken tales of poker games won and face paint tubes exploded.

Oh, and as promised, below are the final entries in the Spooky Die-O-Rama contest! I’m sure I missed a few, since I never get through one of these art contests without pissing off several people. Thanks again to everyone who entered — these entries were truly the soul of this year’s Countdown!

(Click here to see a larger photo!)

Stephanie is just one of the many entrants who was robbed of a spot in the winner’s circle, but at least she’s done her part to make the last batch of Die-O-Ramas feel mighty and proud.

There’s a lot to love with this one — from the wholly custom scarecrow with the paper facial features, to the evil corn dudes who seem to have been crafted out of those amazing corn-themed corn on the cob holders. Any justification for using the word “corn” that many times in a single sentence equals brilliance. Steph, you’re my favorite Steph out of all the Stephs I’ve ever known.

Oooh! This one is pure glee. It’s hard to find dioramas featuring vampires in blood-soaked chambers that manage to seem so harmless and cheerful, but I suppose that’s the benefit of making a vampire out of a hot dog. Tommy even provided a photo of Count Dogula burnt to a crisp, and though he didn’t provide an explanation, I’m guessing that it represents a vampire who was exposed to sunlight.

Also, is this really the only Die-O-Rama that made use of those five-point casino arcade spider rings? To everyone besides Tommy: For shame. [more]

HALLOWEEN IS HERE! Well, almost. Technically, it’s just Mischief Night and an excuse to drink skunked Heineken while Tales From The Darkside spins softly in my DVD player. But we’re so close to Halloween, you can taste it.

Actually, by the time most of you read this, it will be Halloween. And for a fair portion of you, it’ll actually be after Halloween. It’s almost…too much to make sense of. Perhaps God should not have created the pumpkin to be so easily converted into an organic bong.

So ends another X-Entertainment Halloween Countdown. Can’t say that it’s been one for the books, but at least it hasn’t been one for the list. I hope you’ve gleamed some small semblance of morbid merriment from the site over the past two months, but even if you didn’t, I scored a life-sized audio-animatronic Jason Voorhees out of the deal, not to mention lots of sweet chewy candy.

This actually isn’t the last post of the Halloween Countdown — there will be one more. A final party post, including the remaining Die-O-Ramas and, if the rumors are true, dancing skeleton GIFs. I’d give you that stuff now, but since those first few paragraphs up there will only make sense if I publish this bitch by midnight, I’m kind of in a rush.

And yay, I actually have something decent to cover! I found this “Ghost Finders” disposable camera weeks ago at Party City, and it was as if some giant-sized, benevolent-version of the Grim Reaper parted the skies, pointed his scythe at me and said, “today…is the day I give to YOU.”

A camera that automatically adds ghosts to the pictures you take! Inconceivable! I haven’t been this satisfied with a ten dollar purchase since Best Buy took 50% off Dragon Wars.

As the box promises, each of the photos taken with the disposable camera will feature a ghastly image of a spirit, or, in some cases, a disembodied skull. Sure, it’s just a Halloween spin on an existing gimmick, but holy shit, it’s clever. Is there anyone on this planet who wouldn’t want to take pictures of their sneakers and see floating blue lady heads over them after the film develops? Only the blind could balk!

I snapped those photos like my life depended on it. Any previous photograph-related speed-taking records were soundly eradicated. I can’t say that I was taking the pictures with any sense of artistry, but then, that sort of effort is best saved for film that doesn’t belong to a disposable camera that throws skulls over the pictures.

After snapping and winding and snapping and winding and then doing the biiiiiig wind at the end, I was ready to get my film developed and revel in the glories of wacky photography. Unfortunately, there were two problems:

1) Getting normal film developed isn’t as easy as it used to be. The normal stores are mainly expecting digital deliveries. Though virtually any photo-related kiosk is able to act as the liaison between you and another place that actually develops film, I was adamant about getting my pictures back in one hour. After all, I stood to receive pictures of my cats with floating ghost heads covering their midsections. Can you blame my impatience?

2) Even when I was finally able to find a store that could develop film in-house and adhere to the commonly accepted standards of “one hour photo,” I had to come to terms with handing a “Ghost Finders” camera over to someone in public. It’s not that I was ashamed, but do I always have to be that guy? You’ve seen the stuff I buy for your entertainment. Just once, I’d like to exit a store without causing someone there to wonder if I mutilate children in my basement.

But, for wacky photographs, no problem is insurmountable!

I got real, actual, in-hand photographs, but I also had them create a CD with digital pictures, as I was worried that I wouldn’t meet CVS’s unspoken $10 Minimum Purchase clause otherwise. Sad to say…I know they’re inherently doctored photos…but they’re a lot more doctored on the box.

I saw ghosts, yes, but not on all of the pictures. Any photos taken outside or in very bright light lacked ghouls. And, on the pictures that actually did bear some supernatural artifact, the ghosts were often too faint or small to notice without the aid of a monacle. The bright side is, you finally have an excuse to buy a monocle.

But the pictures weren’t all bad. Above are my favorite three, or maybe just a random three. Because the makers of “Ghost Finders” cameras were aiming for bonus points from me, there are actually a lot of different spirits in the pictures. Old bald men, skulls, shrieking women, children — there’s even a cloaked demon in the mix!

The final picture shown above is probably the creepiest in the batch. It’s just a picture of our front windows, if you couldn’t tell. There’s this gnarly old couple shown in the middle, with blacked out eyes and latex-level wrinkles. And they’re smiling. If I developed this film without prior knowledge that the photos were taken on a ghost camera, that picture would’ve caused my head to explode into hilarious confetti.

Not a bad find for ten bucks, and a nice piece of business for us to end this year’s Countdown on. Only, this isn’t ending the Countdown, because I’m posting again tomorrow. I think I already said that. Let’s assume it warranted repeating.

Happy (almost) Hallo!

Great Pumpkin was on tonight, and for the first time in about ten years, I missed it. Well, I caught enough to notice that ABC took some liberties and made Charlie Brown do some heavy lifting promo work during the commercial breaks — wtf was that all about? Missed all the good parts, though. If you’re in the same boat, take note: ABC is re-airing the special tomorrow night. (I’m sure that there’s some ratings/network competition-related reason for this, but I prefer to think that ABC is doing it just for me.)

Thanks to PlantMonster for the hot tip! New (or somewhat newish) at Walgreen’s, it’s the General Mills Monster Cereals lip balm collection!

I located Boo Berry and Franken Berry, but Count Chocula remains elusive. The completist collector in me is disappointed, but on the other hand, I can’t say that I’d be a huge fan of chocolate Chapstick.

There is no feasible way to improve on these. The colors, scents and flavors are totally dead on, to the point where you would guess “Franken Berry” even if you had no idea it was supposed to look/smell/taste like it.

By the way, when I say “taste,” I mean it, and not in that bullshit “lick your lips” sort of way. Of all the awful childhood habits that I’ve never been able to break, treating Chapstick like candy stands proud at the forefront. I’ve long considered lip balm as a more malleable form of Twizzlers.

While we were out Halloween store-hopping this past weekend, I absolutely could not resist this mask. The “Light Up Clown Mask” was fairly overpriced at twenty bucks, but it stood out like an unholy grail in a mask collection that was mostly filled wih easily recognized movie-and-television characters. I had to have it.

What struck me most is how reminiscent the mask is of those last minute costumes that I used to get from local pharmacies and supermarkets. You know the kind. When I was still young enough to wear costumes but too old to really care what those costumes were, it was common to just pick up the most heinous mask still available at CVS on the night before Halloween. If I was feeling saucy, I’d grab a plastic scythe or something to go along with it.

By that point, costumes were no longer a point of passion for my friends and I. We’d still dress up and go trick-or-treating, but by then, it was just a thing to do…not THE thing to do. Besides, we were really too old to get away with action-packed head-to-toe costumes, anyway. The other kids would’ve frown upon it and egged us. With all of that in mind, our half-assed costumes always ended up being something like that evil clown mask — effortless and apathetic enough for us to avoid looking lame, but still somehow great.

The mask has an unmistakable Killer Klowns From Outer Space vibe, and I’m not just saying that because it happens to be a mask based on an evil clown. It really does sort of look like the lead Killer Klown from the movie. Then again, his face didn’t light up.

Yeah, so, the mask comes with a tiny push-button remote, which activates a series of white lights that scatter underneath the mask and make your head look like a Christmas tree. It’s a common gimmick in pseudo-extravagant Halloween masks, but it works well enough — or maybe it doesn’t.

See, what you can’t tell from the crazy animated photo above is that my clown mask arrived completely busted. It’s actually taped together up there. In reality, as soon as I opened the package, the mask fell into pieces. Two whole pieces!

The light-up stuff actually exists on a second mask, which, in a perfect world, would remain glued to the outer clown shell, giving consumers the impression that they’re buying one whole awesome mask instead of two shitty broken ones. Since this is a pretty old item, the ancient glue lost its once-celebrated adhesiveness, and I was left with what’s shown above — plus a outer clown shell.

Am I disappointed? Not really. The way I figure it, I probably saved some kid from having the worst Halloween ever. We so often forget how a child’s sanity hinges on every immediate event, and I can think of no quicker way for a trick-or-treater to have a heart attack than a busted costume. Besides, any kid who would’ve picked this light-up evil clown mask over some tired Hollywood pop idol costume is someone I’d want to save.

Wow, I totally dropped the ball on getting everyone’s entries published in a reasonable timeframe. Sorry about that! We still have a few days left, so by the time Halloweekend is over, all Die-O-Ramas will have had their day in the sun. Or stark raving darkness, as the case may be.

Worst of all, some of the entries I’m stumbling onto now clearly deserved to be among the winners, making me feel like even more of a horrible monster for putting them up so late. Oi. Sorry guys, your work was much more tremendous than my organizational skills. I’m still compiling the remaining entries, but for a taste, here are five reader-created Spooky Die-O-Ramas that you’ve yet to see!

(Click here to see a larger photo!)

Full disclosure: This really should’ve been one of the winners. I knew that the second I saw it, but somehow, I misplaced the e-mail and screwed up. Well, better late than never: Kittymao, you’ve won yourself a DVD! It may arrive after Halloween, but horror movies are still okay in November.

I’ll let her describe it: “In a nutshell, it is the Beginning Graveyard Scene from Night of the Living Dead — the 1990 version, directed by Tom Savini. Johnny has just wrestled with the western Bolo Zombie — AND LOST – and our forlorn and scared Barbara is about to make a run for it.”

Incredibly, Kittymao made all of the elements — she sculpted and painted the figures, and even sketched out the background with precise faithfulness to the film that the diorama was based on. And check out the detail work! Way too much finesse and awesomeness here for me to handle. Awesome job! [more]

Wow, what a score! We visited our local “Halloween City” last night, which is sort of like a lower-rent Spirit in a much vaster space. Taking the place of a former Circuit City, it was an enormous warehouse full of costumes, decorations and totally random, awesome shit.

Unlike the Spirit stores, where everything is Spirit-branded and there’s just a more polished “feel” to everything, Halloween City serves more as a liquidator for old store stock. Yeah, all of 2009’s hottest costumes and decorations were out in full force, but with a Circuit City-sized store to fill, they also dusted off Halloween goods that I hadn’t seen in ten years or more. (One example: They had a few Robocop kiddie costumes leftover from the early ’90s.)

There was also a terrific section closer to the registers, filled will all sorts of cheap Halloween bric-a-brac. Really inane, old and pointlessly magnificent stuff, running the gamut from gag store X-ray specs to large bags of rubber millipedes with header cards that said “BUGS” and absolutely nothing else. The best part? It was all dirt cheap. I’m used to Halloween stores marking everything up by 5000%, but this random selection of oddities seemed more like a spooky yard sale. I snatched up everything that the lone $20 bill in my wallet could cover, and among the treasures was the focus of today’s post: Halloween Mood DVDs!

You know those “virtual fireplace” DVDs that stores sell during the Christmas season? Well, they have the same deal going for Halloween. It started with the “Ghoul Log” (sixty minutes of jack o’ lantern footage set to creepy music and thunder claps), but lo and behold, the collection has greatly expanded. Halloween City must’ve had 20 different mood DVDs on sale, but even at the low price of a buck each, I thought I’d live conservatively and stick with the eight shown above.

Since the same tired mix of spooky pop songs might not cut it if you want your Halloween party to be one for the ages, the idea is that you’d throw on one of these, and turn your television into the focal point of fright. Each of the titles has its own theme, but they all meet the same criteria: Creepy, with frightening visuals, loud and appropriate sound effects, and in select cases, bad techno music.

I really, really love these. They’re low rent productions, and what you’ll see and hear is often much more “silly” than “scary”, but they still go so a long way in setting the right mood. After all, you can’t leave everything up to rubber bats, animatronic Draculas and cotton spider webs.

Course, some of the mood DVDs are better than others, so before you run out to blow your bucks, you may want to read the reviews below.

Halloween Mood DVD #1: “Ghoul Log”
Description: “The fiery Jack-O’ Lantern featured in our Ghoul Log DVD is sure to scare up some fun this Halloween! Complete with spooky sound effects, this funky pumpkin will haunt the living through the night!”

The original, and still possibly the best. With twelve different songs and about as many different pumpkin movies, the “Ghoul Log” is probably the best choice if you want to add to your party’s spooky feel without totally drowning it out. (As you’ll see, many of the other DVDs are very overstated.)

The great thing about the Ghoul Log is that you don’t really need a party to play it. It’s subdued enough to work on any old night, even if you’re home alone with nothing but a book and a beer. You might argue that most folks don’t drink while they’re reading, but some do, and they’re exactly the type of people who’d be able to put up with the crackling sights and sounds of pumpkins-on-fire while they do it.

Also note that the fire shown inside the pumpkins seems a bit…out of scale. I’m almost positive that they just reused the “virtual fireplace” scene from an earlier Christmas DVD and threw pumpkin photos over it. Somehow, that makes me like the Ghoul Log even more.

Halloween Mood DVD #2: “Bone Chilling X-Ray”
Description: “Want to cause some fright this Halloween night? Do skulls and spiders give you the chills? Crawling with creepy creatures, these horrifying X-rays will haunt you to the BONE!”

This one is all-ambiance, only using subtle sound effects to convey its terror. I like its simplicity.

They’re using the term “X-ray” rather loosely, though. The stuff in the above clip is pretty on target, but the DVD is much longer than that, and includes many shots of random body parts and creepy animals to fill its running time. In a lot of cases, they’re not really “X-rays” so much as they are “pictures of stuff glowing green.” But then, I’d rather see pictures of bats glowing green than bat X-rays anyway. My complaint is weak.

Another strong mood DVD. If the Ghoul Log is a little too “precious” and some of the other ones just too “insane,” this one is a happy medium. It sets the tone, but it won’t inspire a 20 minute deconstruction by your guests. [more]

I haven’t posted anything for a week, and in that time, the retail world has all but completely moved away from Halloween and onto Christmas. Not unexpected, but still infuriating. I like Christmastime a thousand times more than Halloween, but I don’t want to see it in October.

In many stores, the Halloween sections have already been shrunk down to half an aisle, surrounded by a growing assortment of red and green baubles — like a lone farmer trying to keep the universe’s most festive locust swarm at bay. I know that I shouldn’t correlate Halloween’s vitality with its shelf space in department stores, but I do. No holiday season should have to die before the holiday actually happens.

But hope is not lost, as the spooky products in today’s post — all found earlier this afternoon — prove.

A series of impending niece-and-nephew birthdays required a Best Buy run, because all any of the kids in my family want are $60 video games and DVD box sets. While there, I stumbled upon an awesome display of lesser-celebrated horror movies, each arriving in its own body bag for 9 bucks a pop!

Pretty clever, actually. The movie are collectively presented as FEARnet’s “most feared,” and we’re to assume that these “body bag editions” were selected by way of an impressive FEARnet poll on the world’s scariest movies. Given the gamut of DVD titles on display, I’m gonna call bullshit on that. What they’re really doing is gathering a bunch of older/independent/unpopular movies, and throwing them in awesome body bags purely for purchase persuasion. And…it absolutely works!

The DVDs come in their normal cases, but they’re all shoved into an extra case, body bag-themed. Incredibly, this is all it takes to get me to buy DVDs that I would never normally buy. I mean, the body bags have working zippers and everything! I’m not entirely convinced that I wouldn’t have bought one even if there was no DVD inside.

I think they missed an obvious opportunity, though. Most body bags are black. At least, they’re black when they’re intended to create an ambiance of dread and terror. These DVD body bars are see-through. It would’ve been much cooler to get “surprise” DVDs in all-black bags. I’m sure that some of you are mentally arguing with that statement — you just can’t picture anyone buying a DVD without knowing what DVD they were buying. I disagree. I think people are much more likely to buy surprise DVDs than repackaged copies of Slaughter High and Stir of Echoes 2. I have confidence in this idea. I will patent it.

And now, a little sumptin’ sumptin’ for the ladies:

Found at Target, it’s another run of those holiday edition “cylinders” filled with tiny-sized dolls in seasonal clothing. I’ve written about other “cylinder edition” exclusives at least a hundred times in the past, but truth be known, I’m aiming for 200.

Among the brands represented, we have My Little Pony and Littlest Pet Shop. The packaging is suitably Halloweenified, but not in any dangerous kind of way. The dolls inside are much more dramatically themed, all wearing removable costumes.

Previous special editions such as this have desensitized me to the otherwise otherworldly thought of horses and dogs dressing up as pirates and witches, but the Littlest Pet Shop pack provided one nice surprise: A spider! I had no idea that Littlest Pet Shop delved so deep! Arthropods! Arthropods with removable ghost sack costumes! Suddenly, the idea that I stood on line and charged toys meant for five-year-old girls on my American Express card feels less sour. A Littlest Pet Shop spider? That was made for me.

Finally, CVS has a new line of Peanuts Halloween figures, in costumes that totally disregard the comics and TV specials. I consider this a good thing. The world did need an action figure of Charlie Brown in his classic multi-holed ghost bedsheet costume, but it didn’t need 80 of them.

Charlie Brown may not have dressed like a vampire in any of the comic strips or cartoons, but that kind of accuracy just doesn’t seem important when you’re purchasing Peanuts action figures from your local pharmacy.

I picked up Chuck and Schroeder, but according to the cardbacks, Snoopy and Lucy are also available. I never held anything but total apathy towards Schroeder, but he’s clearly the chaser figure in the collection, arriving in an awesome Phantom of the Opera costume with a piano accessory. All Charlie Brown got was a cape. Cape is the new rock.