Reminder! Halloween is a time for fun, join us for a giveaway of films and television series as well as other Halloween goodies!
For Halloween, we are gathering all kinds of goodies for a few lucky winners.
Already in the box for the big winner are a trio of films from Visual Vengeance (big thanks!), a slew of varied sources DVDs and Blus, some stickers, bookmarks, candy, and a few more surprises. We still have a few feelers out for more goodies, so there will be plenty in the big winner’s box.
It’s surprising that “The Halloween that Almost Wasn’t” has managed to become something of a mini-cult classic over the years. It was a TV movie that was almost lost to time, and once reclaimed, has survived thanks to nostalgia. The TV movie was much before my time, so I don’t have any real sentimentality directed toward it. In either case, ”The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t” isn’t the best Halloween special, but it has its heart in the right place, even through the cheesy final scene.
Before they became hacking and slashing horror movie characters (?), “The Banana Splits” were a niche kids program from the seventies. They were performers dressed in animal outfits that performed original pop rock like “The Monkees” and got in to various misadventures. They’d also show various animated shorts during the program. While I was never personally a fan, “The Banana Splits” were so much more interesting than “The Monkees” ever were. Their animated Halloween special is also one of the highlights of their television life, even if you’re not a fan.
I usually have a lot of awful to say about modern Looney Tunes, but “Looney Tunes Cartoons” has at least tried to honor the legacy of the Looney Tunes. Say what you want about Warner’s handling of the Looney Tunes library but “Bugs Bunny’s Howl-O-Skreem Spooktacula” really isn’t half bad. It’s actually a pretty decent attempt to conjure up the spirit of the classic Looney Tunes as we remember. It has its finger on the pulse of the comic timing and classic raunch we know and love about the old shorts. It’s funny that Bugs Bunny gets the title of the program since he only has one short in the end of the program, meanwhile Porky has two that he shares with his usual foils.
“The Legend of the Vampire” is a bittersweet occasion. As it is one of the many, many “Scooby Doo” animated movies, it is also apparently the first Scooby-Doo movie to feature Casey Kasem, Heather North, Nicole Jaffe and Frank Welker together since 1973. The gang are back together to bring what is a pretty strong and fun mixing of the usual Mystery Inc. exploits and some great rock and roll music. Once again, we see the appearance of The Hex Girls who should, by all rights, have their own animated spin off by now. Ah well, a man can dream.
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
If you’re an avid movie goer and movie lover, most of the time you can tell when a movie is going to stink five minute in to it. Sometimes it’s from the first moment, but sometimes it takes at least five minutes. When I trekked to Manhattan to see “House of the Dead” a week before Halloween, it hit like a gut punch within the opening credits that I was not going to see the next zombie movie masterpiece. Granted, this was 2003, and I hadn’t heard of Uwe Boll. Hell, I barely had any knowledge of what “House of the Dead” was as a whole. I just know that the ads for it on MTV looked pretty damn cool.
I was at a weird mind set in 2003. I’d just come out from open heart surgery in July, and I’d spent the entire summer suffering, especially after the historic black out that took out power from most of America for twenty four hours.
I could definitely picture re-watching Ryan McGonagle’s “Black Pumpkin” down the line. If anything it’s so bathed in Halloween ephemera that it’s a decent bit of background sounds for the respective Halloween geek. What holds it back though is that there seems to be so much behind the narrative that we’re not informed on, thus there feels like a big chunk of the intend narrative is either cut out or missing. That’s due to the fact that “Black Pumpkin” is technically a sequel to the 2016 movie “Bloody Bobby,” later-released in 2021 as “The Legend of Fall Creek.”
So, it’s a sequel—kind of. But not really…?