The weather has been particularly spooky around here this past week, boils and ghouls. Honestly, it feels like my neck of the woods has just decided to skip autumn and head right into winter, which I'm not terribly excited about. Hell, the next few days are expected to bring ice and snow to the desolate rural area in which I live, which I'm just not ready for. At all. What happened to autumn? I got like four days of autumn. Climate change is really scary, kiddies.
I did go to a local pumpkin patch a few days ago, which was nice. I nearly died of exposure due to the freezing temperatures and bracing wind while tromping through the fields and looking for the perfect future Jack-O'-Lantern, which wasn't so nice, but I still had fun. Luckily, no other folks were stupid enough to be out at the patch in these conditions, so I didn't have to worry about beating up any unwary strangers who were trying to steal my damned pumpkin. That was my big Halloween adventure for the year. Everything else has been canceled, so it's not like we have a lot of choices out here. No haunted houses around here have been brave enough to open up for the season, which is for the best, considering how things have been shaking out thus far this year. But that doesn't mean you can't have any Halloween fun.
I'm honestly just going to do what I usually do this year, so the whole pandemic hasn't really changed my plans. I'm going to carve a Jack-O'-Lantern, watch a few appropriate movies and get very drunk on Halloween night, which has become something of a tradition for me. And I'm a man who loves his traditions.
Have you ever seen HauntedWeen? It's not a good movie by any means, but it's a lot of fun to watch on Halloween night, especially if you're hammered. I guess that's my recommendation. Watch HauntedWeen. I don't know if it's streaming anywhere, and the DVD is apparently out of print, so that's not such a great recommendation, is it? I bought a copy of the DVD from the film's official website nine years ago for HauntedWeen's 20th anniversary, but the domain hauntedween.com has lapsed, so I don't know what to tell you. I keep hoping that some cool boutique home video label like Vinegar Syndrome or Synapse will put this forgotten gem out on Blu-Ray, but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps with next year being the film's 30th anniversary, some kind soul will take pity on HauntedWeen and give it the deluxe treatment it so richly deserves, but I'm not holding my breath. Kind of a shitty recommendation, really. Here's a movie that you can't really find easily or cheaply, so don't watch it for Halloween.
HauntedWeen really is a terrible title, isn't it? But it's also a fun title. It's a title that fits the movie, I'll say that much. It would make a great double feature with Scary Movie. No, not the 2000 slasher parody film Scary Movie, the 1991 Halloween hang-out nightmare Scary Movie starring character actor John Hawkes in one of his earliest roles. Now that forgotten gem finally did get a home video release last year, courtesy of the heroes at the American Genre Film Archive, and it's just a great little time capsule of a movie. So Scary Movie is readily available for viewing at all your Halloween movie parties that you really shouldn't be having this year.
Or just watch the quintessential Halloween slasher, a true cult classic that we all know and love. I am, of course, referring to 1988's Hack-O-Lantern, starring character actor Gregory Scott Cummins, best known to modern audiences as Mac's jailbird father from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. That's a film that is dripping Halloween atmosphere from its every frame. So go watch Hack-O-Lantern. And Scary Movie. And HauntedWeen, if you can find it.
And you should also listen to the final chapter of our special Halloween edition of Trappo's Chap House. In this conclusive episode, I recommend a bunch of movies to Ky that he will never watch, we both wax nostalgic about our shared Halloween past a bit more, and the true face of Trappo is finally revealed. To me. Not to you. You've already seen the true face of Trappo. It's the image embedded on the player below. But since this podcast was recorded back in May (SPOILER), it represents the first time I saw the true face of Trappo. Listen below, or on iTunes or whatever else.
Chapter 666: Trappo's SPOOK House! (Part 4)
That's all I've got for you this week, fiends. Halloween is next week, so I'm sure I'll think of something to do here when the time comes. I have no idea what that might be at the moment, but I've got a few days to come up with something. I probably should have started posting these podcasts a week later, then I could have just posted the final episode on Halloween, which would have saved me a lot of trouble. But I'm an idiot who doesn't think things through, and now I have to figure out something else to do here on Halloween. It's my own fault.
Stay Spooky, Motherfuckers!
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