Welcome back to the current spookfest that is Zangz's Blog of Geekdom! I'm your resident grave digger, Zangz.
One more fun filled week to go before the dead go back to residing in their crypts, graves and tombs until the next Halloween season comes to bless us with its supernatural presence. Be sure to enjoy it while it lasts, 'cause the crap pile that is the winter holiday season is waiting in the wings, ready to pounce with its cold weather, obnoxious people, crowded stores and malls and bank accounts with huge dents in them. First person to start singing "Jingle Bells" gets a grave shovel slammed to the side of their skull! I mean it! ALL HAIL BAH-HUMBUG!
Lets move on to happier, more harvest filled pastures, shall we? Last night I went over to my sister's house where my Bro-in-law and I went out on the front porch and enjoyed a nice big cigar and an Octoberfest and enjoyed the faux grave yard he has on his front lawn. While admiring the creepy little graves with store bought dummies popping out of the ground, we sat and talked about how Halloween decorations are coming very close to selling as much as Xmas decorations. Yet, we also noticed how many fewer yard haunts there are in our neighborhoods. I believe I brought this up last year on the blog also.
Outside of my Bro-in-law, there were NO other houses on the block that had any little set ups. You rarely have to build your own graveyards anymore as the Halloween decoration industry takes care of that for you. Fake gravestones have become more affordable. They now produce spooky, corpse like figures to stake into the ground. These are also at a far more reasonable price than they used to be. Halloween decor that used to be anywhere from $25 to $50 is now $10 to $20. So why aren't people taking advantage of this? Has there been a black hole of imagination of the people in our fair city. Let's get with it people! Get your lazy, unimaginative butts down to the local Walmart, Wallgreens or Target and pick some stuff up! The end of the season is nigh!
On to other Halloween related stuff. I went to my last Haunted Attraction of the season last weekend. I doubt I'll be able to fit in any others or drag anybody to them this season. So here's the review for...
Lister Effects Monster Mayhem - In a nutshell, this one was short but sweet. Imagine if you will a rather large, fun filled pizza parlor on the south side of Milwaukee. The inside has a nice little bar (however, they need to work on their beer selections) a game room and a big diner area with lots of cool '50's decor. And of course, the pizza is great! But, according to rumor and reports, the U.S. Government has installed a secret science base just below it. This particular evening we visited there was some sort of biological accident where most of the staff in the labs were turning into flesh eating zombies! Even though this haunt was pretty short it had a hell of a lot of charm. I think the best thing about this haunt was all the actors and actresses who were really heavily into their rolls. The whole thing was played off as an actual B-Grade zombie movie with lots of dark comedy mixed in to make it that much cooler. I don't know if this was a pre-fab haunt (one that was made by a company and then sold to the people ruining it) or if they put it together themselves. If they did, then I have to give them lots of extra props for being pretty frackin' creative! Could have been longer, but it was still fun as hell! I recommend it if you want to go out and have some good pizza and have some time to kill (pun intended) before you do so!
Let's close with some horror movie reviews....
Lake Dead - Maybe I'm getting a little too jaded, but I felt that Lake Dead was pure crap! It had EVERYTHING we've seen before in horror movies. The film fixates around a psycho family (very poor-man's Texas Chainsaw type group....without the chainsaws) who occupy a small inn close to a man made lake out in the woods. When a group of beautiful, young people arrive in a camper to claim the inn as their own all hell breaks loose and they become the hunted as the psycho family don't take too kindly to it. There's the usual torturous deaths of the young group, but what really bothered me was that the writers decided to use rape for shock value to an otherwise C-grade horror flick. Pinning people to trees or chaining them to the bottom of the lake is one thing, but when you bring up images of rape on women in a horror flick you've opened up a whole can of nasty shit. To put it bluntly, it was a very insulting and dumb thing to bring into an already schlocky pile of crap to begin with. Avoid this at all costs. (See trailer HERE).
Unearthed - To put it simply, this was Alien meets Tremors. A podunk town out west finds itself inhabited with some sort of creature that was accidentally dug up from an excavation site. The creature runs around tearing people apart. And who knew that alcoholic Sheriffs of such remote towns could be so hot. This one fairs slightly better than Lake Dead. Not the best, but I've seen far worse (Lake Dead). (See trailer HERE)
Dog Soldiers - If you're a fan of werewolf movies and you haven't seen this movie from England, you need to run out and rent this now. Though it won't go down in the pantheon of werewolf movies like American Werewolf in London, it's still one of the best I've seen. A bunch of British soldiers who are training with war games out in the dark woods of Scotland find themselves hunted by a pack of werewolves. They become pinned in a quaint little farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere. They're forced to fight for their lives against the beasts. Not only is this a very gory movie, it has characters you begin to care about. It may be a horror movie, but it focuses on the soldiers as a group and that is what makes it different. There's also a slight twist towards the end of it that I thought was kind of clever. It's a must rental for the Halloween season! (See trailer HERE).
Ok, I gotta go get some food then watch a few more horror flick and perhaps get going on Oblivion and finish up the Shimmering Isles' main quest so I can move onto Fallout 3 next week.
Your homework, until the next post, is to go out of your way to do something Halloween influenced and imaginative this week! If you don't come back with a report you'll fail the semester.
Stay vertical!
Zangz.
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