Issue #194

Fall Festivities

It’s the beginning of November, which means there’s currently entirely too much candy in the house. Typically, when the kids have any sort of candy supply, we’ll ration it out a bit and make sure they don’t have too much at once. But if you do that after Halloween, the kids will be eating candy every day for the rest of the year. So, we’ve basically been letting them have as much of their supply as they like over the weekend, in order to reduce the inventory in an efficient manner. Yes, there are mood swings, and feverish bursts of energy, and subsequent crashes. This is the nature of life aboard the Skittles train.

We attended two big Halloween celebrations this year. The first was a fall festival at the elementary school, which featured lots of little games kids can play to win prizes. It’s impossible to lose these games, really. If you throw the ball through the hoop successfully, you get candy. If you miss completely and throw the ball all the way across the parking lot, you still get candy. Another game involved choosing a rubber duck out of a tub. Allegedly, if you picked a regular duck, you got a little candy, and if you picked one of the secretly marked lucky ducks, you got a lot of candy. Eileen picked a regular duck, and was given a giant fistful of candy. I suppose this mentality is for the best, as it avoids having dozens of distressed children scattered across the parking lot, sobbing because they failed their assorted Fall Festival challenges.

Eventually, after acquiring a reasonable amount of candy, the kids moved on to the giant inflatable slides + giant inflatable obstacle course, and proceeded to get in line to enjoy these over, and over, and over again. I assumed we were going to spend the rest of the evening at the inflatable slides until something even more exciting caught their attention: the DJ booth.

Now granted, a DJ booth doesn’t sound like the most exciting thing in the world, given the other options. But this was a fall festival DJ booth, which means that in addition to playing all of your favorite family-friendly Top 40 pop hits (“Ordinary,” “APT,” a half-dozen songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters, etc.), the DJ would toss out what he called “candy bombs” between songs. Basically, he would grab a giant scoop of candy, and toss it into the crowd, sending the kids into a frenzy. So you get your candy, and you feel the rush of snagging a couple of pieces, and you dance that energy out, and then you get more candy, and so on. Suffice it to say that we were pretty much parked at the DJ booth for the remainder of the night.

Our second Halloween outing was on Halloween night, when we wandered through downtown Dallas, GA, where more candy was acquired from local businesses. The crowds seemed just a little thinner this year than they were the year before, and the number of businesses participating seemed a little smaller as well. Maybe with so many Halloween-centric events happening in town the previous weekend, people were Halloween’d out by Halloween. But, the weather and people were pleasant, and the kids had a good time.

When we got home, everyone was pretty hungry for something other than Smarties and Dum-Dums, so I made grilled cheese sandwiches. It’s a very simple thing, a grilled cheese, but really hits the spot when you’re in the mood for one. They should be indulgent, too, or else what’s the point? I usually put about 2/3rds of a tablespoon of butter on each side of the bread — enough to make it extra-buttery without interfering with the crispy crunch you want it have — and use two slices of American cheese, with a thin layer of shredded cheese between them. Glorious.

Finally, three new-to-me horror movies that I enjoyed watching during the month of October:

Dark Night of the Scarecrow: My friend Mike recommended this made-for-TV horror movie to me, starring Charles Durning as an embittered mailman who leads a lynch mob in hunting down a suspected killer — a mentally challenged man named Bubba (Larry Drake). Only thing is, the lynch mob’s victim turns out to be innocent… and begins seeking vengeance from beyond the grave. It’s a remarkably effective little movie, and works around its network TV limitations to address some disturbing subject matter in a surprisingly thought-provoking way.

The Last Winter: By regular movie standards, this is a low-budget riff on John Carpenter’s The Thing, but it’s also the biggest-budget movie ever made by indie horror auteur Larry Fessenden, who specializes in quietly ambitious, character-driven tales in which the monsters are merely one of numerous problems to be dealt with (his masterpiece is 1997’s Habit, about a guy who may be in a self-destructive relationship with a vampire, or may simply be self-destructive). This one is about a group of scientists (played by Ron Perlman, Connie Britton, James LeGros, and other familiar faces) who begin succumbing to madness in arctic — or is it something more supernatural they’re succumbing to? Whatever the case, they’re getting picked off one by one. Oh, and one of them believes the world might be ending soon. It’s an eerie, atmospheric, quietly tense thing, with well-sketched characters, and despite a few dodgy CG effects in the third act, I found it absorbing.

WNUF Halloween Special: This one is more no-budget than low-budget: if reports are to be believed, it was made for $1500. And boy, was that $1500 well-spent. It’s done in the style of an '80s television special, and the gimmick is that small-town reporter Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) is doing a live TV special on a legendary haunted house. He interviews local residents, some Warren-esque paranormal experts, a Catholic priest, and eventually goes inside the house and starts poking around… and wouldn’t you know it, creepy things start happening. Between the segments of the special, you get commercial breaks, which aren’t excuses for wacky comedy, but original commercials that really do feel as if they could have been pulled from a local access channel. It could add tedium, but instead makes the whole thing feel more authentically like a creepy old VHS tape found in the back of a dusty drawer. It’s a nifty little Halloween mood-setter that has found a modest cult following, and miraculously, is now being sold on Blu-ray at Wal-Mart.

Note: Dark Night of the Scarecrow is currently streaming on Tubi — The People’s Streaming Service — while the other two films can be streamed on AMC+.

Back at ya later