Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Halloween Disappointments and Traditions

Well, I have to say that I'm disappointed with the kids in my neighborhood. We had a total of three trick-or-treaters last night - and they all came at the same time. Which means my roommate and I have a bunch of candy we really don't want sitting around the apartment. I'm thinking I'll unload a bunch of it in the break room at work. You leave anything edible with a sign reading "FREE!" in a university break room, and it'll be gone in short order!

On the plus side, I maintained my own personal Halloween tradition of great (or simply greatly bad) movies. If Halloween falls in the middle of the week, I usually don't have the time or energy to do anything on Halloween night (plus there's the whole handing out candy to kids, or at least trying to). So I hang around the house and watch Halloween appropriate movies. I usually try to pick one which great for being so cheesey, one which is a little more . . . polished, maybe, and then one which is an all time cult classic.

For my great cheesey movie, this year I picked Evil Dead II. If you have not seen this, you must! It's an all time classic bad horror film, complete with demons, zombies, and even has blood in three different colors (red, black, and green)! As if all that wasn't enough, it also has some great lines and physical comedy. Let's face it, the idea of Bruce Campbell having to cut off his own possessed hand and replacing it with a retro-fitted chainsaw is too good to pass on.

My more "polished" film for this year was The Crow. After all, it's an enjoyable film with some pretty good acting and a decent script. And as it takes place on the night before Halloween and involves people coming back from the dead, it's entirely appropriate.

The all time classic cult film to which I referred early is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I have watched Rocky nearly every Halloween since I was about 13 or so. I have been to live showing of it, and I know the proper responses to the film (for example, when Dr. Frank-N-Furter calls for a toast, you throw toast, or when you yell "BACK ROW" as loud as you can during the opening song). And, having watched it so many times, I can safely say that no man (and I do mean "man") on Earth can pull off a black teddie and five inch heels better than Tim Curry. Plus there's the whole watching a young Susan Sarandon run around in her underwear the whole time.

So, I was disappointed with the kids, but I watched a bunch of great movies and was, in the end, fully amused. Hope Halloween went well for everyone else and happy Dia de los Muertos!

2 comments:

Journey said...

It's a sad, sad state of affairs, isn't it?

We didn't have one trick-or-treater. Not one. This is down from a less than stunning total of nine or ten last year. I even bought really good candy, with the idea that anybody who made it as far as my door deserved the really good stuff. It, too, is going to work.

My roommate was at her parents' house and informs me that they had very few kids there, too. And that was one of the prime trick-or-treaking neighborhoods when we were growing up. Hell, parents from twenty minutes away would drive their kids up there to trick-or-treat because it was so safe.

When did we decide to live in fear?

JanieBelle said...

Wow. We probably had over a hundred assorted ghouls, goblins, pirates, characters, and corpses visit our place. Of course, we've had our decorations up since October first, with a really great graveyard and a large inflatable haunted house for the kids to walk through and be terrorized. Seemed like everyone had a good time, even the ones too scared to go through it.

Someone awhile back asked for video of it but I don't remember who, so it's posted on the blog if you're interested.