Happy Halloween!  Here's this year's spooky finale: a look at the scariest house in history, with dozens of horror icons immortalized as costumed mannequins, tons of bloody rubber heads, and even a few feet-eating alligators.  We're currently fending off scores of trick-or-treaters with Almond Joys and Butterfingers.  I'm about to bring the Countdown up to date, so if you're one of the poor souls without much to do tonight, check back later for some last drips of horrifying fun.  Have a good one!

Well, I finally saw the Texas Chainsaw "reimagining," and boy, did I ever get my hopes up for this one. I'll be honest — I probably bought into the hype a little too well, and compacted with the number of great reviews I'd read, the flick had little chance of living up to what I was expecting.  Still…good God.  Many would say that comparing it to the original causes a rift in objectivity, but seriously, it's like they chopped off all of the really twisted stuff, replacing it with more of the same old crap and hoping the added gore would keep you from noticing.  The changes seem designed more to make the movie conventional enough to be a money-generator than any sort of creative new ideas or "well, what if we did this instead?" hope shots.  For what it is, I guess it's okay, but "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" breaks no new ground and doesn't even hold up against those other lousy sequels on a "depraved joyride" level.  It's just made better, performed better.  The story itself?  Definitely not better.

The only thing I'd give 'em credit for is for playing the horror hand straight.  The atmosphere is correct, but that's about it.  The characters do enormously stupid and unrealistic things to remain in the line of fire, and basically, what you get is something that's just a few notches above any of the "Friday the 13th" movies…albeit with a better cast.  This movie was just way too artificial to succeed in what it set out to accomplish.

That said, is it worth seeing?  Yeah, I guess so.  I have to wonder if I'd be this critical had I not gone in with such high expectations — I'm sure it's a factor, but really, our group of six left the theater seeming more apathetic to the past two hours than anything else, and we've got wildly varying tastes.  All in all, you're not doing yourself any huge injustice by missing this one, but compared to most of the other horror flicks to come out in this past year, it works well enough.  It just doesn't go beyond working "well enough," and that's the big issue for me.  Oh well.

Here's my review of Tales From The Darkside: The Movie.  I absolutely love this flick.  If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and head to the video store.  Don't wait for it to pop up on cable — it's worth the rental.  Hell, it's worth buying.  Halloween's approaching, and this movie perfectly fits the mood.  Meanwhile, the Countdown's been updated with something you're probably more interested in checking out than a movie review: The Battle of the Slashers!  Freddy, Jason and Leatherface have a quick debate over which of 'em is the top icon.

I think we've got time for one more article between now and Halloween, so I'll try to make it as crazy ass seasonal as possible.  I hope everyone got a kick out of the Countdown this year — judging from my stats, people were checking it out regularly enough to warrant another go-around next year.  For what it's worth, I had loads of fun with it.  For the past month and a half, practically everywhere I went had the side agenda of searching for more Halloween crap, and it's not like it wouldn't have been like that normally, but now I had a reason.  Yay.  Wish I could've gotten a few more horror movie reviews up this month, but oh well — I'll do those on any month, and the stuff on that Countdown was only good for now, obviously.  Anyway, it's been a pretty good month for the site, but you might be wondering what's coming up now that Halloween is almost here.  Oh boy.  Next month is gonna be killer.  Honestly, what's lined up in terms of articles are topics I'm totally salivating over, and if I thought I was busy this month, November's gonna be a real test.  Suffice to say, I don't think that anyone who regularly reads this site is going to be anything short of mega excited when the ball gets rolling, so stay tuned.

Whoa oh oh, hey hey hey.  The Countdown's back up to date with four new entries; a good mix of old and new crap.  On the new side, we've got Mummy candies and plastic spider rings.  Okay, so the rings are technically old, but I just bought 'em, so there.  On the old side, check out this glow-in-the-dark box of Ghostbusters Cereal, and a look back at the mostly unpopular but still happily monstrous Little Dracula toys.  The latter two entries both include commercial downloads, hooray.  Time for me to get mah groooove on with the next movie review, so I gotta get going.

For those who doubted the workability of those Shrunken Head Apple Crafts, take a look at this.  Remembering that I only followed the "official" directions halfheartedly, here's what my apple dude looks like now…

As far as rotten apples go, it's pretty cool.  The biggest glory lied in the fact that I never hung the thing outside to dry, and it still made it to this esteemed point without ever once becoming infested with fruit flies.  Vincent Price knew his shit, I tells ya.  Working on a horror movie review now…it should be up before the weekend's over.  Keeping in mind the holiday that's rapidly approaching, this is definitely a great flick to keep on your party reserves list.  Countdown will be updated sometime tomorrow afternoon, with mummy action.

Oh, has anyone noticed that most of the stores are already shifting the focus from Halloween to Christmas?  Christ!  Kinda takes the steam out of the spookiest holiday of the year when all of the assorted Dracula decorations are hidden behind fat Santas.

"Tex" just sent in something cool.  Here's what he had to say: "I was looking through my old Nintendo games the other day and came across Mike Tyson's Punchout!!  The funny part is I still had the copy of the letter that came with the game (which I've attached a scanned picture of).  It's a letter from Mike Tyson himself!  Well not really, but it's got his picture on it and his printed signature.  I'm pretty sure he wasn't the actual one to pen the letter.  The best part is when it talks about how "anger is never positive and, therefore, never results in positive outcome."  I'm sure that's a solid philosophy of his."

Ha, this is great.  Click here for the full-sized version.  Could they have made the letter read any less like something Tyson would've written?  I can't even imagine him being able to read aloud what's on that paper, much less forge it.  The funniest thing is, they're all perfectly fine and valid lessons for kids to learn.  It's just that…well…they're coming from Mike Tyson.  True, his penchant for raping and biting people wasn't huge public knowledge back then, but come on…Mike Tyson?  It's like having Grandma tell you how to Vertical-69 without losing your balance.  These merits would've been better suited for teaching by someone who didn't kill kittens and eat babies and murder priests.  Maybe Buster Douglas?  Or Cold Stone?

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