Halloween Fun Continues! Haunted Houses, Sharks, Bugs, Dino Drac Funpack, plus NYCC 2020 Recap!

This has been a very surprising October so far. I've been having a good time, all things considered and the momentum keeps building up. 

My order from Troubled Moon Films arrived. I am now a proud owner of the Suburban Sasquatch Double Disc Edition (with special features) and a beautiful Suburban Sasquatch figure totem! Both items are really great and I highly recommend getting both while you can. The figure totem is in sparce supply so act quickly. 

Side note: I really love the movies from Troubled Moon. I have three of their films on DVD so far and I will eventually have all of them. It's been a few years since their last project so I hope they make a new movie soon. 

And I finally had the Hocus Pocus shake from Carvel. Delicious! Last years Slime Shake was a marshmallow shake with the green caramel sauce, and this one is a cookies and cream shake. Really tasty and it looks great. I'm keeping the cup. 

In a surprise turn of events, I ended up going to Long Island over the weekend and while there I was treated to a trip to the Long Island Aquarium! I didn't know what to expect; I haven't been to an aquarium since I was a little boy. It turned out to be an incredible place. 

I was really surprised to see the sharks! There were so many of them, and they were pretty big. I don't know a thing about sea life so I have no idea what sort of sharks these are, I probably missed a plaque somewhere. 

I loved this little octopus friend. He waved to us from his little home. ❤

Another surprise was how it was more than just an aquarium. There were penguins, seals, insects, bugs, butterflies, and even monkeys! 

Later, after the aquarium, we went to a haunted house called The Darkside Haunted House, and it was really really fun. It was every scary movie you've ever seen stuffed into one location. All the performers and set builders did an amazing job. 

No pictures or video were allowed inside, which is a shame, but I can really say I was impressed with their production. You can tell they worked really hard at it. I look forward to going back someday. 

After the haunted house, and a haunted corn made who's name I can't remember but was fun, we went for dinner at a place called Lucharitos. It's a wrestling-themed Mexican restaurant and the food is really good. Think of Chipotle, if Chipotle served decent food. I absolutely loved the decor of the place too; you can tell the place was founded and decorated by fans of old school pro-wrestling culture.  

I had the cheeseburger burrito and it was spectacular. There were chunks of burger patties, waffle fries, pickle slices, and veggies in this thing. The spicy mayo was really good and added a decent kick to the whole sandwich. 

New York Comic Con 2020 had a really small turnout. Normally it'd be thousands of people piling in, but this year it was just me and a friend. So, not the most successful NYCC ever but still... pretty good???

Yeah there was no con this year. Heartbreaking but it was for the best. My friend and I decided to go check out the Jacob Javits Center though. I was still expecting there to be some other people there, like cosplayers, but nope. It was basically a ghost town. 

After visiting the Jacob Javits Center, we went to our normal post-con eatery, the Skylight Diner. Normally after the con it's difficult to get a seat here, and the whole place is filled to bursting with fans and cosplayers, collectors and sellers, and on this day it was just us. 

So at the diner we would normally show off the stuff we got at the con. We had to improvise so we swung by Book Off and got some stuff there instead. 

This Slimer statue is pretty amazing. I think it was a part of a Ghostbusters fan box sold at Walmart. Whatever the case is, it's mine now and I will love him forever. 

I also swung by Krispy Kreme and got some of their Halloween donuts. They're definitely cute but the ones from last year and way more interesting designs. 

The vampire donut is jelly filled, so that's fun. 

I was also gifted a Halloween goody bag from my friend. I received a Ghostbusters Paranormal Investigator badge, a Creepshow Comic Book Club membership packet, and a rubber roach I named Wilbur. 

And lastly, since this arrived a week after I started putting together this post, I received my first Dinosaur Dracula Funpack. I follow Dinosaur Dracula on social media and I usually want the stuff in the funpacks so since I couldn't do much this year for Halloween, I decided to give it a go finally. I'm happy I did; I loved everything inside the pack, especially the Lucky Yuckies! 

I was really happy with this funpack so I'll probably keep my subscription until the end of the year!

All sorts of cannibals

Headcheese poster by Tanimetal

So I've been watching a lot of movies that feature cannibalism. Not on purpose, it just turned out that way. It's been great and I've found some fun movies to enjoy this month, even if these movies aren't specifically Halloween themed. 

Headcheese is a movie from the good people from Crude Comics & Cinema, and stars Richie Ramone. I watched it on Troma Now but it is also available currently on Amazon Prime, and if you like really wild and strange movies this is definitely up there. It's a tiny monster gore-fest, kinda like Gremlins or Critters. 

Headcheese is really great actually. It's very high energy and I think I could describe it as a "punk rock garage band" film. The production value seems pretty low, but they do a lot with what they got. The editing and sound quality is all over the place, but it never slows down and the music is really engaging. The inbred cannibal trolls in this movie are siblings that go around killing and causing mayhem are pretty simple puppets, but they look great. I thought their origin was pretty creative. 

It's a crazy movie, and I'm happy I stumbled onto it. 

Moving on, I don't know how I missed out on Flesh Eating Mothers all these years. It's definitely up my alley. It's schlocky and really hokey, but it works. One of those movies where you probably couldn't recreate the magic that made it happen in the first place. It's definitely a farce, poking fun of zombie movies I suppose, but it plays itself straight even though the premise is absolutely ridiculous. 

Only mothers are affected by a sexually transmitted disease that turns them into lunatic cannibals. They'll devour their own children and husbands! It's great! The """teenagers""" in this movie are all close to 30 years old, but I feel like they were meant to be even younger. There's a character named "Timmy" and I get the feeling that he was meant to be played by like a 10 year old or something, but he's played by an adult actor. 

The makeup on the flesh eating moms is wonderful, they all have this toothed smile. The gore is pretty good too, but I am in love with the animation they made for the scene where the scientists are examining the virus (you really have to see this scene!). Like, if you enjoyed Killer Klowns from Outer Space, you might enjoy this.

This may have fallen into my bucket of all time favorite movies. 

I haven't watched BEWARE! CHILDREN AT PLAY! in maybe 20 years, so when I saw it up on Troma Now I decided to give it another watch. It's still as strange and off-putting as I can remember, but now certain elements of this make a bit more sense. 

Kids are being kidnapped by an older kid who was lost in the woods with his father, a brilliant literature professor, and is forming a cannibal cult based on elements of Beowulf. The children call themselves "goblins" and go around killing and devouring adults. Meanwhile, a farmer named Braun (who might be the descendant of the Brownie religious movement, led by cult leader Preacher Brown) proclaims that the children have become demons and must be sacrificed to appease God. A sheriff teams up with a author who specializes in the paranormal and hopes to solve all this mess. 

BEWARE! CHILDREN AT PLAY is surprisingly dark. I mean, maybe not "surprisingly" but it is dark especially when you see how silly some of the violence can get. The last five minutes is just the Braun cult followers murdering the children. It's a legendary action sequence and it's definitely earned it's infamy, but you will laugh at a lot of the carnage.

This movie was distributed by Troma, and it falls on the pile of Troma movies that I feel deserve some sort of prequel, or sequel, or even a sidequel. I would really like to see a movie about like the Preacher Brown religious cult which was  talked about in the beginning of the film, or even a direct sequel. 

This is probably my favorite movie about killer children