by brenton crozier
From its pagan heyday, identified by bonfires and animal sacrifice, to its current excuse for slothful children to embellish their corpulent figures with complimentary confectionary handouts, Halloween commemorates the best society has to offer. Whether you think Halloween is evil and should be euphemistically called a Fall Festival, are fixated with bad horror movies and goth-metal music or are of the puff-paint pumpkin sweater variety, Halloween brings out the bad taste, pettiness and social awkwardness in us all. I would like to take this week to celebrate some Halloween all-stars, the inventive pumpkin artistes, and Halloween’s faux pas, the schlocky costumes that we all had to endure for a few trick-or-treat outings from yester-year.
I never realized what could be done with a pumpkin, knife, some art supplies and a passion for pumpkinry. This is “pumpkin carving at its wildest!” This is truly all things pumpkin and features the most bizarre, humorous and creative carving that I’ve ever seen. An incendiary tone is literally set from the start with the flaming pumpkin on the home page. The site includes how-tos, pyrotechnic information, design strategy, contest winners and the crème de lem crème: the photo gallery.
It’s all here folks, the conjoined twin pumpkins, the electrocution pumpkin, the Pac Man pumpkin and my favorite: the puking pumpkin. I didn’t think that pumpkins could be so engrossing, but I’ve spent hours looking through this entertaining and informative site.
Whether you want to switch up the routine Halloween décor or are the kind of person that salivates at the thought of taking a power tool to your pumpkin, extremepumpkins.com has something for you. Not even the most boorish punk could smash one of these guys!
Do you remember the prepackaged Halloween costumes that came from Woolworths in a flimsy cardboard box? They were plastic, cheap, had that rubber band that pulled your hair upon application and were kind of creepy with the static expression. You could be the disturbing version of your favorite celebrity, comic book hero or monster without any thought or effort.
Retrocrush features all the greats, mainly the hits from that tasteful decade, the 70s. This site dubs itself as “The World’s Greatest Pop Culture Website.” I’m not sure if it lives up to such billing, nor do I plan to find out, at least not this week. It looks interesting, but I need to stay focused.
These costumes are indeed tacky, deliciously kitsch and extremely funny, although we are laughing at them, not with them. I mean seriously, there is a reason that this style of costume got downgraded from Halloween attire to bank robbing apparel.
All of these costumes are worth taking a look at, but there are definite standouts. The Gabe Kaplan (Mr. Kotter of Welcome Back Kotter) features a creepy-fantastic mask with afro and mustache, along with the trash bag-esque suite that features the faces of the “Sweat Hogs.” The site points out that you could “just go naked with it (the mask) as Ron Jeremy.” Eww, gross.
The Flipper costume is accurately called “freakish” and conjures up thoughts of that disturbing children’s book series Animorphs. The write-up describes the costume as “some experiment from The Island of Dr. Moreau gone horribly wrong.” Wasn’t the point of that story that all the experiments went horribly wrong? Well, we know what they are trying to say.
I saved my absolute favorite for last. So who was the kid that wanted to be the biker guy (also referred to as “Leather Guy”) from the Village People? I wonder if there were groups of friends that collaborated as the entire band. The site points out that this costume was probably the “second choice after the Richard Simmons costumes were sold out.” This was a costume that was just bursting out of the closet!
Happy Halloween and be careful if you are planning to sport a sweet Gabe Kaplan costume or planning to take a blowtorch to your pumpkin.
EU does not condone any type of activity that involves blowtorches or Gabe Kaplan costumes. Unless you take pictures and send them to us, then give us the green light to publish them, but not really.
|
EU Critic’s Choice Awards
