Countdown to Halloween: Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" at Disney California Adventure

Making time to enjoy the Halloween festivities at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure has proven to be a little rough this year. Between my latest stupid, ongoing illness (a hard cough that won't go away, lasting well over a month), a short vacation away to La Jolla for a few days (way too short), and the generally busy activities in the household, we find spare moments to attend the parks when we can. The problem is exacerbated by Disney having added more dates for Halloween parties than ever before, and then cross that with even more dates being blocked out for cast members around those parties. To top it off, we have friends coming down in another week, and though they were able to score Halloween party tix, we were not alas, as they were completely sold out by the time we tried to grab some.

The spooky smile greeting you when you enter Cars Land this Halloween...

But, not to worry... we will still get into the park to have some Halloween fun. We just have to make a conscious effort to pick the right dates to go. Jen and I had managed to get to Disneyland mid-September to ride the reopened train, see the Main Street Halloween decorations and take a ride on the Haunted Mansion Jack Skellington-style. In keeping with our usual Halloween tradition, we would have liked a chance to ride all of what we call the "Skeleton Rides" (i.e. an attraction, with a ride component, that has a skull, bones, or skeleton built into its design; namely, the Jungle Cruise, Indiana Jones, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the Haunted Mansion.) The Skeleton Rides is our own name for the collective group of attractions... Copyright Jen & Rik 2005-2017... that we quite often like to ride one after the other, especially on a Halloween trip. [Note: See more about the Skeleton Rides at the bottom of this post.] Unfortunately, we were in a time crunch and only managed to fit the little we could into the span.

Two of the attraction titles changed for "Haul-O-Ween": Mater's Junkyard Jamboree
is temporarily Mater's Graveyard Jamboree instead.

Not to worry though; our friends will soon be here and we have secured a hotel room for one night so we can stay up late and enjoy the Halloween atmosphere in the park about a week before the actual holiday. But until then, I just had to find a little time between the gaps. I had both a doctor and a dentist appointment last Thursday just down the road in Orange, so Jen's mom Sande and I found ourselves with the second half of the afternoon open. That gave us a couple or three hours of time to spend hanging out in Disney California Adventure waiting for Jen to get off work so we could go use a special employee discount coupon at Napa Rose for our dinner reservation that night. (The food? C'est magnifique!)

Weird spider thingy dangling above the street. All of the creature constructs are made out of car parts.

Because I was not feeling up to too much craziness given my cough, Sande and I decided that just casually strolling around and taking in the Halloween decorations was a solid plan. (We did sneak in a sit-down in the old Muppet Theatre to watch an extended trailer preview for Thor: Ragnarok. I won't say anything more except: Goldblum is hilarious as the Grandmaster.) Naturally, the decorations on Buena Vista Street hit us first – including my first glimpse of the new Headless Horseman statue – but I will touch on those later in the month. [I have posted a photo of the Horseman on my Facebook page. Check it out there if you missed it.] The focus this time is on Cars Land, which has gotten some heavy promotion for its holiday celebration lately, which they have titled "Haul-O-Ween".

More weird spider thingies on the side of Sarge's Surplus Hut; note the patch of Jack-Oil-Lanterns to the right.

From the outset, I have not been a fan of the Cars movies produced by Pixar and Disney. (And I have only seen the first two so far.) This is not to say that I don't like them. I just haven't been gaga over them like I have so much of the rest of Pixar's output. Part of the problem is that Pixar set such a crazily high bar for themselves from the beginning, that anything that doesn't quite hit that mark for me just looks OK. Just one element can be off the slightest bit in a Pixar film and that becomes the difference between genre-shaking, ground-breaking, top tier entertainment and a movie that is merely "good". The first six Pixar films, in my opinion, fell into that first definition (as did releases 8 through 11); Cars, their 7th release and Cars 2, their 12th, fell into the merely "good" category. For me, that is. Maybe you don't see it the same way and that is fine. I have said from the beginning that this is how the Cars films appear... FOR ME.

A quartet of pretty terrific fake horror movie posters are plastered along the side of a garage, my favorite being Escape to Hitch Mountain...

The level of quality in the Cars films is not being judged here; the craftsmanship, attention to detail and design, and sheer love of the animated form that seems to have gone into the other Pixar films is here in equal abundance in the Cars series. By every measure, these are entertaining films that please their audiences across the board. I was even entertained by them. But FOR ME, there is something out of place in the Cars films. At first I couldn't define it, but I finally figured out that the missing element was... me. My involvement. That is, a human touch. I have a hard time identifying with the world of Cars because it seems to be a place where mechanical constructs have come into being without the interference of humanity. If indeed humans were once a factor in their coming to life, it seems like they have replaced us. We may be dead as a species, and the entire series is a post-apocalyptic landscape where cars have somehow become sentient beings who have taken over the world.

First entrance to the Cozy Cone Motel section of Cars Land.
Note the Jack O'Lantern faces on each cone.

That is a little too chilling a premise for a series largely pointed at kids, so there has to be a different solution. I have two theories, but neither one of them allows me to warm up to the series any more than I am able to do. Theory #1) We are invisible to the cars. We exist, we work, we build them, and the cars achieve some form of sentience that is known only to them. Cars and humans are unable to talk to each other; humans see cars only as objects to be owned and used; cars, with a reduced form of intelligence and sensory apparatus, are unable to actually detect us. We are like ghosts to them – ghost riders in essence – and while we are actually the ones controlling and driving them, they believe that they are controlling themselves in the process. 

My personal favorite of the cones at the Cozy Cone Motel: the Popcone booth.
I usually grab dill pickle-flavored popcorn and a wild grape tonic here (THE perfect combo),
 but not this trip. The coolest new thing was that you can get "add-ins" for your
popcorn, i.e. various candies like M&Ms, etc. This will happen when I am
there next week.

Still, that is a bit too much for a kids film (and perhaps too trippy), and so my second theory involves kids in the solution. Theory #2) The world of Cars only exists in the minds of children. As a kid, my brothers and I would build elaborate worlds in our basement combining all of our toys into one huge conglomeration of playtime imagination. Our Fisher-Price Little People buildings and blocks and Lego sets would form a city, combine with Hot Wheel tracks for roadways, and all our army men, space aliens, monsters, stuffed animals, and whatever else would populate it. We each had collections of Hot Wheel and Matchbox cars, and they all had names and even voices, because we had them talk to the Little People, soldiers, aliens, etc. like everyone else. It could be that the world of Cars is part of some child's playtime, only – in a marked difference from the Toy Story series – the car toys have no recognition of their child controllers. They don't pretend to be asleep when their child enters the room or walks up to play with them. They just continue their storyline unaware and uninterrupted by concern for their controllers.

Of course, I have not tested these theories against more recent viewings of the films to see if either theory holds up, or to see if there is maybe an element that I am missing somewhere. As it goes for the moment, the Cars films stand – once again, FOR ME – as lesser entries in a series of films defined by consistent excellence in every department, and yet far better than the bulk of so-called "entertainment" which lies far below it. (For comparison, I place Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur, two more recent Pixar projects, in the same place as the first two Cars films. All are entertaining films, but just miss that high water mark Pixar has, perhaps unreasonably, set for itself. Or did we set it for them?)

Radiator Springs Curios had a huge amount of holiday-themed changes, which surprised
me because I tend to pass up the shops most of the time when I visit Cars Land.

And so, with what some would term my "Cars hatred" intact (just because I liked them a little less than something else better), one might assume that a section of a Disney theme park entirely geared toward the Cars franchise would be out of bounds for me. Why would I like something called Cars Land if I couldn't buy into the fantasy in the films which inspired its creation?

This is perhaps my favorite addition in the entire "Haul-O-Ween" makeover: a monstrous, screaming wreck
of an old beater with a tree growing right up through its chassis. The undead are alive and loose in DCA!

As I had noted, the missing element in the Cars films was my being able to feel a part of that universe as a human. From the moment that Jen and I got our first taste of the new Cars Land back in 2012 – when we got to attend an exclusive cast member preview – I was completely blown away by how completely immersed you become in the world of Cars... precisely what I needed to finally belong to it. As we walked through a doorway in a temporary construction wall and saw the Route 66 desert mountain vista for the very first time, where the Radiator Springs Racers zoom around a track designed to look like the open road, I was instantly won over by Cars Land.

Gas pumps in front of the curio shop, done up in Haul-O-Ween flair...

The retro feel of Cars Land was also a big plus, playing that nostalgia card for all its worth, and as a child of the '60s and '70s, it squared right in on my weak spot. Especially for the odd details of the period and the trivia that I love so much: parodic knockoffs of Burma Shave signs; giant traffic cones turned into a roadside motel (but actually serving as snack stands featuring a variety of goodies); a diner disguised as a gas station that serves classic diner fare; and the constantly spinning array of songs featuring lyrics about cars and assorted hot rods. In five years of regular visits to the area, I haven't gotten tired of looking about the place yet.

The leaning tower of tires in front of Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters – or Luigi's Honkin'
Haul-O-Ween for the moment – gets a more seasonal sort of tread...

The changes for "Haul-O-Ween", some of which I have noted in the captions, include the renaming of at least two of the land's trio of ride attractions. Luigi's Rollicking Roadsters is temporarily Luigi's Honkin' Haul-O-Ween instead, though from the brief glimpse I got in passing was that the ride itself remained the same. Sande thought maybe they might have spookier music on it, but it seemed we heard the same "Italian folk tunes" from before. However, promotion for the celebration calls our some new tunes on the ride that have Halloween themes, so perhaps I wasn't listening closely enough. As we passed the windows of Luigi's, there were a set of "pumpkins" designed to look like they were made out of tires, but the picture I took was not what I wanted. Perhaps if I ride it next week I can get a snap of the tire pumpkins window from inside, while I wait to ride it and hear the new Halloween music playing on it.

The Tow Mater Junkyard Jamboree attraction that sits at the very front of Cars Land's main entrance is briefly called the Graveyard Jamboree instead. Once more, I did not get a chance to ride it this time, so I didn't see inside to see if they added fangs to the cars or did some weird decorative changes. I took a quick look at the front of Radiator Springs Racers at the back part of town and, unlike the other two rides, saw no substantive changes to the signage or the attraction's name (apart from the usual Halloween decor). I suspect that riding one of the racers into the mountains and through the town inside will reveal some special "Haul-O-Ween" decorations, but once more, that is on hold until later.

Here's the Horn-O-Plenty that appears outside the area for the Luigi ride, Note, even more
"Jack-Oil-Lanterns" situated about the horn and sign.

As to the regular cars that roll through Cars Land and engage with the human visitors to the area, we saw Lightning McQueen at the Cozy Cone Motel. He was done up like a superhero, with a long cape-like appendage sticking off his normal spoiler. We also saw Cruz Ramirez, a new vehicular character from Cars 3, dressed up like a pirate. I did not get a picture of her because too many people were in line getting photos with her; plus, I had no idea who she was at the moment, not having done much research in the way of Cars 3 until now. As to the other area car characters, I did not see Red the Fire Engine or DJ (the one that shows up with the party music in midtown) in our walkthrough this time. The vehicle that I was most hoping to see, Tow Mater, was also a no-show, and I was pretty disappointed by this because he dresses up pretty goofily like a vampire. Who knew that one day I would saddened over a character voiced by Larry the Cable Guy not being around when I wished?

C'mon... c'mon... eat the baby... eat the baby... you know it will be both tasty and crunchy...

There is definitely a lot more for me to see in Cars Land for Haul-O-Ween. I did not get a good shot of the billboard sign at the front of the land (because a whole family darted right in front of me... stupid families; they should be banned from the park...), and I wanted to take more time at the actual attractions. I also did not get to check out the really cool spider car that has left webbing high up over Flo's V-8 Cafe, nor did I walk in the direction of the vista area for the Racers attraction. So, don't be surprised if I throw up another pack of Cars Land "Haul-O-Ween" pics closer to Halloween.

Until then, I'm up all night to get spooky,

RTJ

[More notes on the "Skeleton Rides": Jen and I also don't count Tom Sawyer Island, which has plenty of skeleton action, because it is all walkthrough for those portions. Technically, the Disneyland Limited, too, could be a skeleton ride because there are dinosaur skeletons during the Primeval World portion of the round trip, but we don't always find a good opportunity to ride it all the way around, so we don't count it as part of our regular "Skeleton Ride" rotation.]

The Headless Horseman Does Ride Indeed...!

Pics of the truly haunting appearances of Headless Horseman preceding the parade at Mickey's Halloween Party on Wednesday night, October 26, 2016 at Disneyland...

More on our night at Mickey's Halloween Party later this weekend...

RTJ

You'll Die Laughing Once Again! (Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards Pt. II)

Last year during the Countdown to Halloween, I posted a remembrance of an old series called Topps Creature Feature Trading Cards, but that most people just call You'll Die Laughing, because those words are pasted across the backs of each card in the set directly above the joke section. If you did not see it, click here to play catch up, as this is Part II of the piece.

This is a posting of the next thirteen cards in my You'll Die Laughing collection. I do not have a full set, which has always bothered me considering how much I love the cards, but the opportunity to grab a full set has just never presented itself to me. I know that I can find them online, but just haven't done it. In the meantime, I am still fully appreciative of that which I have.

Because the series was released in 1973, some of the jokes reflect the mores and politics of that time. As an example, card #26 features the mummy Kharis carrying a woman (whose face, as I mentioned in Pt. I, is one of those that has likely had the face of a Topps employee superimposed (rather badly) onto it; cards #23 above and #29 below are other examples). The joke reads "You're not going to that Women's Lib meeting and that's final!" 

As 1973 was a big year in the Women's Lib movement with the passing of Roe v. Wade and Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs in a highly publicized "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match, the card certainly reflects the battle going on in the public eye at that time. But it plays the same today considering how much the news has been filled in recent months with rape trials with ridiculous outcomes, the ongoing fight over abortion rights, squabbling over public breastfeeding, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood, women still not getting equal pay for equal work, and a presidential nominee talking brazenly and proudly about molesting women, but also seems in constant forward motion in his ongoing reign of terror by demeaning any women that cross his path.

Some of the cards (like the ones above) featured wisecracks that became stock jokes in our household, at least while my brothers and I were kids and were still being directly influenced by regular readings of these cards. I have always been fond of the one featuring the Creature from the Black Lagoon as an opera-singing gondolier, or the one where Frankenstein's Monster gets upset with the Wolf Man over saying his mother has a mustache. (Mother jokes are always funny... always...)

The card with Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera dressed as the Red Death above, where he proclaims "My girdle is killing me!" was probably one of the earliest drag jokes that I enjoyed as a kid. Yes, I know men can wear girdles as well, but the selection of the shot with the Phantom having a "clutch the pearls" moment has always read more feminine to me, thereby making the Phantom's action into a drag-style joke. Another fave is the image of Kharis (above, with Lon Chaney, Jr. under this particular makeup) where he asks "Who fooled around with my butane lighter?," looking for all the world like he had just lit himself on fire.

I was never as much of a fan as a kid of the cards that were marked with "American International Pictures, Inc." on the back instead of "Universal Pictures Co., Inc." Some of the one-liners on the fronts were just as good (or bad) as the Universal ones, but I didn't take to the AIP cards the same way as I did the Universal ones because the AIP ones featured monsters or characters that I didn't know (for the record, I had barely seen any of the Universal films at that age, but every kid knows Frankenstein and the Wolf Man anyway). Frankly, even now I have a hard time identifying some of the AIP copyrighted films, even though I have probably seen all of them several times.

AIP Example #1

AIP Example #2

AIP Example #3

That's all for the second batch of You'll Die Laughing cards. I will post another group for your enjoyment in the near future. In the meantime, drive all of your family and friends crazy with the stupid jokes on the backs of the cards. They'll thank you for it! No, honestly... they will...

RTJ

[As before, all of the images of cards in this article were scanned from my personal collection. Feel free to copy and use as you wish, but if you repost on your website, please credit The Cinema 4 Pylon. Otherwise, please share in the silliness.]

Anthology Schmanthology: Fun Size Horror: Volume Two (2016)

Fun Size Horror: Volume Two (2016)
Dir.: various
TC4P Rating: 5/9

Speaking from a technical standpoint, it would appear that Fun Size Horror: Volume Two comes in an even funner size (as in: shorter collection, by almost half an hour) than the original volume, a grouping of several short films of varying quality and talent built around horror themes. It turned out that I like the first volume overall (see my review here), and I was hoping that the ratio of decent to merely banal would continue for the newer group.

However, I have always thought that the notion of a tinier portion of candy bar being a more "fun" size than a normal bar to be idiotic, because why would you want less candy bar? What's so fun about that? I think it is just marketing b.s., and we have allowed this notion to take over the Halloween candy industry without someone calling foul on the whole process.

To the point, though, Volume Two of the Fun Size Horror franchise (yeah, I am afraid so; they have a new online series for 2016 as well) comes in a smaller package, and a more apt definition somewhere for the phrase "diminishing returns" hasn't been revealed in ages. In my previous review for the first volume a couple of weeks back, after rating each short film in it one by one and tallying up an average, I found that I actually liked the film far more than I thought that I had while engaged in watching it. Would that also be the case with Volume Two? Well, the cat (black, of course, to fit the Halloween theme) is already springing about the room after being freed from its sack, having already let it slip slightly above that it wasn't. But let's go through this thing one by one as I did before... 

Initiation
Dir.: Michael May
TC4P Rating: 6/9
An interesting piece with which to begin the proceedings. Complete within itself (though you may not feel that way given what is revealed in the "twist"), Initiation also seems to serve as somewhat of an introduction to the remainder of the collection. Co-producer Mali Elfman (composer Danny's daughter), who is all over the place in this anthology along with fellow producers Michael May and Zeke Pinheiro (as they were in the first volume), not only takes the lead acting reins here, but also serves as the writer. Mainly a monologue piece, Initiation is a decent enough start for Volume Two. Two notes on this short: it was filmed entirely using candlelight, and the artwork that surrounds Elfman is that of acclaimed novelist Clive Barker, though it really doesn't play much of a hand in the story at all.

The Last Laugh
Dir.: Zeke Pinheiro
TC4P Rating: 5/9
An aging television star is haunted by the way he treated his ex-wife on their I Love Lucy-like sitcom, Life with Daisy. After she dies, guess who comes calling for revenge because of the credit he took over the years for their success? This one veers closer to a Tales from the Darkside in style, which is neither a knock or a compliment, just an observation (sort of a memory reflex). There is a slapstick punchline built into the back half of the piece that actually pays off for me, but the results overall are pedestrian and a little dull at best. This one would have benefited from a stronger lead. And if there is something in this world that I am actually afraid of, its having to watch fake audiences laugh at staged comedy within a film, especially when the people playing the fake audience aren't all that great at acting in the first place.

Kill Them Mommy!
Dir.: Peter Chun Mao Wu
TC4P Rating: 5/9
This is the most frustrating type of short, and it is not because it was executive produced by Brett Ratner. Surprisingly enough, his involvement actually raised my hopes a tad (for once), because I thought it might lend a bit more gloss to the look and feel of the film. You see what the director was going for in Kill Them Mommy! (it almost plays like an extended sequence/trailer for a lost Italian horror flick from the '80s even though it clearly takes place today), and the sudden insertion of a full title card twice in the proceedings makes it feel like it desperately wants to be included in a Grindhouse Vol. 2 collection instead, were such an unlikely event ever get made. I kind of appreciate someone taking the fake giallo/Italian horror route, though it has been done by others recently at a very high level; see The Editor as just one example. But the problem here is that the tone is all off through half of the attempt. The style is maddeningly inconsistent within just a few minutes, and sometimes even in the same scene, and for the second film in a row in this collection, the lack of a stronger actor in the lead fails the short. (Yeah, twitching your head at the right moment always means "confusedly crazy"...) Neat use of color, though, in the kill scenes. Almost feels like confetti flying. 

Prey
Dir.: Stephen Boyer
TC4P Rating: 4/9
The only student film in the Fun Size Horror series to this point, Prey actually feels, for at least a couple of its minutes, equally as accomplished as many of the more professional films surrounding it. Four gawky teens wander an abandoned facility in a search for one of their group's missing dog. They argue at first about how wise it is to split up into smaller teams ("You're not gonna Scooby-Doo me!"), but they do, of course, which is exactly how we will get to the title eventually. Not bad as these things go, and I like the energy of the four kids (which you will not hear me say often about a group of amateur teen/young adult actors). The payoff, however, is absolutely expected and therefore underwhelming to me, and ultimately makes me question the logic of the entire enterprise. 

Whispers
Dir.: Max Isaacson
TC4P Rating: 6/9
OK, this one went for full-bore crazy and just about succeeds. Gory, nasty, sickening to the point of distraction, I am glad Whispers was placed as early in the anthology as it is. If it came later in the proceedings, I may have thought Whispers was a masterpiece after having to sit through so many less well-conceived films. As it is, while animal rights activists and/or the squeamish may not wish to sit through it (I am pretty certain that everything was on the up and up with the animal performers though), this tale of a man obsessed with ridding himself of menacing rats is about as truly gruesome as this series gets. Strikingly composed visually, I almost got the sense Whispers started (or was intended) as a story in a graphic novel (or comic book, to you and me). Personally, I would have named the film Whiskers instead, but that is a minor nitpick. 

The Great Corben (in "Abraca-Danger!")
Dir.: Mark Alan Miller
TC4P Rating: 4/9
I am not one to criticize badly done animation if the humor behind it pays off or is interesting in a storytelling sense. We should be, by this moment, pretty used to animation that is probably not the greatest in terms of fluidity or design of movement, but matches the stylistic and dramatic intent of its filmmaker. The Great Corben is somewhat of a combination of stiff, South Park-style movement (or even proto-Gilliam at times) combined with a lusher, early 20th century graphic sense in its backgrounds, costumes, and setting. A strange, off-kilter tale of a very stage-frightened (and ultimately disturbed) magician, I think that I would have preferred if this one were told by live actors instead. The extended dialogue might work better then, but as it is, rather takes one out of the story from the start, to where one has to backtrack to remember what the point was. It just didn't quite work for me, and the reveal is anything but magical.

Pillow Fright
Dir.: Patrick Rea
TC4P Rating: 6/9
"Light as a feather, stiff as a board." The short that is the most pure fun of the group. College girls playing stupid games one night (many in their undies, of course) decide to have a pillow fight and collapse in exhaustion. Too bad, because the pillows are not just sentient creatures, but full on murderous in intent. Really goofy, bubbly (despite the outcome), and a taste of what this series desperately needs: out of left field ideas with a light sense of humor, but that still deliver the goods in a horror aspect. I don't know if I am ready to see an 80-minute film churned out from the single theme of killer pillows, but people are still talking about Death Bed forty years later, and at least this short film is intentionally funny.

And They Watched
Dir.: Vivian Lin
TC4P Rating: 5/9
The custodian in a chamber with an electric chair has little care for anything except for doing his job, until he is trapped by the ghost of the last man to be executed in that chair, who was wrongfully accused of his crime. I will admit that I have a real problem with execution scenes (especially hangings), and it is not just a political issue with me (though that plays a part) but also from seeing the wrong pictures in the wrong books as a child and being haunted by them for years. 

Playing Dead
Dir.: Ned Ehrbar
TC4P Rating: 5/9
This one has a really cool idea: a bunch of bored ghosts get their kicks pranking regular humans by pretending to come alive on autopsy tables, cutting off their faces and climbing into the backs of cars, or lighting themselves on fire. You know, the kind of things we all might do once you discover you have superpowers but have nowhere to go because of some stupid rules binding you to the earthly realm. But they have a new member of their group who just doesn't quite fit in with the rest. I am not going to lie. This one started out in a fairly promising way, and the cast works well together, including Tracie Thoms as one of the ghosts. (Diva Zappa has a bit part.) But it falls apart in two areas: not enough inventiveness with the ghost gags, and a final punchline that just falls completely flat. Like badly conceived improv flat. And I should know, because I have been in some badly conceived improv in my day.

Pinned
Dir.: Andrew Wesman
TC4P Rating: 5/9
I like it when horror attempts to update (however hamhandedly) to new technologies, and with so many thousands of apps on our phones and other devices, I figured it would be no time at all before we were regaled non-stop with variations of old themes updated to the millennial sensibility. One Missed Call and its American remake aside (which made use of cell phone tech, pretty well in the first case and unnecessarily so in the second), Why there aren't a thousand films of people being catfished by ghosts already is beyond me. Or is it just too easy to kill victims now because everyone is just so self-absorbed taking social media photos? Who has time to notice a lurking killer? Pinned makes vibrant use of cell phone tech to tell the story of a guy who is being stalked by an unseen killer that can only be detected through camera shots captured on a GoogleMaps-style of application. Once more, I am intrigued by the basic concept and it spins along nicely for a minute or two, but the execution leaves me cold by the end, when digital nonsense starts crashing into reality and I can no longer buy into the story. 

Perfect
Dir.: Taylor Phillips
TC4P Rating: 5/9
"You promised me a perfect time." Perfect is actually a sequel to Anisa Qureshi's short film, The Lover, from the first volume of Fun Size Horror, with Elfman reprising her role as a formerly spurned lover turned murderous psychopath. This time, her character of Lisa is back out in the singles market, as a woman obsessed with her personal sense of perfection. She wakes up with a one-night stand guy who is anything but perfect, but she is able to justify even his "dad bod" (which, refreshingly, it is and far beyond it) to maintain her ideal. Except there is one little thing that bothers her... I like Elfman's performance here, though the character really does not feel like the same one from The Lover. The M.O. seems a bit different, and the only real nod that they might be the same character (besides being played by the same actress) is a rather tacked on epilogue that feels a bit unnecessary. I will give the filmmakers credit for inventive use of an iron, though... 

Conventional
Dir.: Karen Gillan
TC4P Rating: 7/9
A former horror film star actress (named "Bloody Disgusting's Scream Queen 2007") who has fallen on hard times (and has had terrible lip surgery in desperation, resulting in a permanent set of duck lips that repel her former "fans") does her time at a horribly under-attended convention. She even finds herself regaled to turning tricks in a bathroom stall with the occasional man dressed as the slasher killer from her film series, Axe Wound. It's a pretty surprising directorial (and writing) debut for former Dr. Who companion Karen Gillan, and her performance here is easily the best thing in all of Volume Two, though it is not faultless. Gillan's debut behind the camera is far more assured than I could have hoped, and I wish other films in this batch had been as thoroughly thought through as Conventional turns out to be. Conventional does make more of an attempt at character growth than any of the other films (though growth may not be the right term; regression is more like it), and you can really see and feel the wheels coming off Gillan's character's bus internally. That they placed this one at the tail end of the lineup is no surprise at all, given Gillan's fanbase from hanging out with the good Doctor, and now becoming a Guardian of the Galaxy. It is also just damn good luck it turns out to be the best film of the lot as well.

*****

So, we have a dozen films of varying quality, and summing up the ratings totals, the per film average rating is a 5.25, which is only slightly down from the 5.3 for the first volume. However, I rated Volume One a 6/9 in the end because of the higher ratio of hits to misses. This volume has eight less films in it, and I actually only ended up liking four of the twelve shorts, so I have chosen to go with a 5/9 rating, "5" being my middle of the road rating, neither good or bad, just "blah". But, by all means, if you have a Hulu subscription, watch it all the way through just to get to see Conventional. Or at least move that little bar all the way to the 1:03:00 mark and just watch Conventional.

I might be knocking much of Volume Two, but I do want to see more installments of Fun Size Horror in the future. It is quite clear to me, however, that they need to get away from the feeling of a "house style," that is, endless cameos or appearances by Mali Elfman and Michael May, and need to reach and embrace a wider variety of actors and directors to get more fresh blood into the proceedings. When the same people keep showing up as extras in film after film after having been leads in other shorts, it becomes a little annoying. While it may be fun to have the feel of a repertory house or even a family atmosphere in your studio, onscreen it doesn't play as freshly as you might think. And producer/director cameos can be fun if Alfred Hitchcock is the personality involved, but too much of this stuff at a low level just becomes cloying. It feels a little too cutesy. And cutesy is very rarely scary.

RTJ

Mr. Mixtape-ptlk, Track #8: "Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard" by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (1994)

Screamin' Jay Hawkins is not an unknown figure on my old Halloween mixtapes. I have used him a couple times before, and I will use him again. The most natural fit, and the first song that I ever used of his because of this, is I Put a Spell on You, his most renowned and ultra-famous track, a song that everyone who is worthwhile and not a waste of frigging space on this planet should know. 

Most would assume, like I did at first, that owing to just how famous the song is that I Put a Spell on You had been a Number One hit at some point. Nope. Written and recorded by Hawkins in 1956, I Put a Spell on You never charted despite being released as a single in multiple version. The song, for a variety of reasons (and you can guess at some of them) was banned on many radio stations and record stores.

But you could put almost any Screamin' Jay Hawkins song on a Halloween mixtape of any variety, and be able to come up with a pretty good case why it should stay, no matter what the content might be on the song. Other Halloween favorites of mine that Hawkins essayed are Feast of the Mau Mau, wherein he described in excruciating detail every lurid element that goes into each course of a headhunter feast (only partially cannibalistic), and Little Demon, which tells the tale of a furious, love-besotted devil who will do anything to get his demon love back... you know, the kind of story all parents love your kids to hear, especially in the '50s.

Then again, anything Hawkins sang, even the most innocent subjects, like pure love in the song Frenzy, could sound exotic, profane, mysterious, lurid, filthy, and arcane, sometimes all at the same time. He punctuated his lyrical readings with strange burbling noises, scat syllables, popping sounds, and other mannerisms that separate any of his tracks easily from any other performer of his time. They also make him marvelously fascinating to listen to even sixty years later, because you just never know what you are going to hear come out of him next. His song Moanin' is basically under three minutes of Hawkins screeching nonsense sounds over a blues riff and nothing more for the first full half of the song, and then deciding to actually sing something close to lyrics for the second half... and it kills. It's smoky and pain-ridden and sweaty, and nearly perfect.

Hawkins toured for decades, and this is where he had it over everyone for many years: Hawkins had THE ACT... he was Alice Cooper, he was Arthur Brown, he was the Cramps, Marilyn Manson, the Misfits, GWAR – before the world had any idea that we wanted a horror show music act onstage, or even needed the role to be regularly fulfilled time and time again throughout the years. He dressed in wild costumes, wore tusks coming out of his nose, arose out of a coffin onstage, carried a staff with a skull on the end and snakes winding around it, and performed crazy rituals while the music pumped around him. He influenced scores of artists, more than you could ever imagine. And if you ever meet anyone who doesn't love I Put a Spell on You as sung by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, then they are lying to your face.

One of those artists was Tom Waits, who would be cast along with Hawkins in the 1989 film Mystery Train by mutual friend, director Jim Jarmusch. (Jarmusch had used I Put a Spell on You quite memorably in his breakthrough arthouse hit Stranger Than Paradise.) In 1994, Hawkins released an album of new material titled  and included amongst the tracks was his version of a Waits song – Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard – originally written for Tom's 1978 album, Blue Valentine.

Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard
(Tom Waits)
As sung by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Comin’ in on a night train with an arm full of boxcars
On the wings of a magpie cross a hooligan night
Busted up a chifforobe way out by the Kokomo
Cooked up a mess of mulligan and got into a fight

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack

You probably seen me sleepin’ out by the railroad tracks
Ask the prince of darkness about the smoke from the stack
Sometimes I kill a jackal and suck out all the blood
Steal myself a station wagon, drive it into the mud

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack

I know you seen my headlights and the honkin’ of my horn
I'm callin’ out my bloodhounds chase the devil out the corn
Last night I drank the Mississippi and now its dry as a bone
I was born in a taxi cab; I ain’t never goin’ home

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack

My eyes have seen the glory of the draining of the ditch
I’m comin’ to Baton Rouge to find myself a witch
I'm gonna switch me a couple of ‘em every time it rains
You’re gonna see a locomotive probably think it’s a train

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack

What you think is sunshine is just a twinkle in my eye
I got a ring around my finger called the Fourth of July
When I get lonesome, a tear falls from my cheek
there's gonna be an ocean in the middle of the week

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack

I come in on the night train with an arm full of boxcars
On the wings of a magpie cross a hooligan night
I'm gonna tear off a rainbow and wear it for a tie
I never told the truth so how in the hell can I tell a lie

Whistlin' past the graveyard, steppin' on a crack
I’m a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack


Words and Lyrics by Tom Waits | Published by: Fifth Floor Music, Inc. (ASCAP), © 1978

Waits' lyrics are a perfect match for Hawkins' style, even if the opening verse smacks fully of the beat style that is more a fit for Waits than anyone else. But the song settles into bluesier, more accessible territory, and Hawkins wraps his voice around every syllable, making each one count. While I am a huge fan of Waits and have the bulk of his catalogue in my collection, I sincerely believe that Hawkins improves upon Waits' own rendering of the same tune, even making some lyrical edits that tighten the structure of certain lines so he can deliver them with maximum impact.

The song is not overtly Halloween material. Apart from the graveyard mentioned in the title and chorus, we aren't meeting monsters or ghosts or anything purely evil here. Taken at face value, the song is merely about a man bragging about exactly how BAD he is. It's really nothing more than the type of boasting one might find in many older blues songs or current rap or hip hop songs. 

But Hawkins, through the words or Tom Waits, speaks of bloodhounds chasing down the devil, of killing a jackal and sucking out the blood, seeking out witches, and consulting with the prince of darkness. And he sells it all through that incredible, commanding, and – by that point in time – slightly weathered voice of his. The performance doesn't just make you believe that the man in the song is as hard as they come, but also the dark, haunted world he inhabits. If that isn't Halloween territory, I don't know what is.

And if you hear this and don't believe Screamin' Jay Hawkins was a mean Mother Hubbard Papa One-Eyed Jack, then you just don't know anything at all.

RTJ