[click here to see the full-sized photo!]
They're heeeeeeeeeere! As you probably know, Pox and I spent a long time planning out our new Halloween pixel poster, so I'm happy to report they're finally ready to ship out just in time for your 2011 Halloween season. The new Halloween party pixel poster is the exact same size as our summer and winter pixel posters (34" x 13.5") and you won't believe some of the references we managed to cram into it. You might even notice some of your own suggestions made the cut! Just click on the image above to enlarge it and see what I'm talking about.
So please help show your support for all the Halloweeny stuff we do here on I-Mockery each year and order a poster (or two... or all of them) whether it's a gift for yourself or for somebody else. I promise you'll end up staring at it for a loooooong time to come and it makes for a hell of a conversation piece for whenever you have friends over. If you're a fan of isometric pixel art along with basically any Halloween stuff we've ever written about on this site, then you're going to LOVE this poster. You'll love it so much, you'll store it in a coffin during the day to make sure that the harmful sunlight doesn't destroy it.
Ultimate Retro Halloween Party Pixel Poster:
United States Orders
Ultimate Retro Halloween Party Pixel Poster:
International Orders
Also, for those of you who've still somehow put off buying the other two pixel posters, it's time to stop procrastinating, because we're doing a special 3-Pack where you get all three of our pixel posters for cheaper than they would cost to buy separately. Plus, we're only charging you for the cost of shipping one of them, so you'll save on shipping as well. And just look how nice they look when hung together:
[click here to see the full-sized photo!]
Don't they look happy together? Wouldn't they make you happier having them hanging on your wall? Don't you want to be happy? The answer to all of these questions is obviously YES, so order them all before your brain explodes into chunks of 8-bit gore!
Pixel Poster 3-Pack:
United States Orders
Pixel Poster 3-Pack:
International Orders
As long as you order by October 15th, they're guaranteed to be in your hands in time for Halloween... after that, I can't make any promises. Don't forget, anybody who purchases our new Halloween pixel poster will be given a secret link to a page containing the complete legend for the poster to help you identify all the characters. Thanks in advance to all of you who order these new posters and I hope they prove to be the prized centerpiece of your Halloween decorations this year!
Survey: We'd love to hear what you all think of the new Halloween party pixel poster, so please drop a comment below!
So back in the 60s, MPC relased a set of eight mini-monster figures including characters such as Dracula, the Wolfman, a witch, a skeleton, and more. Originally, people collected these little monster figures in grocery store vending machines, but some years later, the Frito-Lay company re-released them as a new set of mini-monsters, and a one figure was included with every bag.
Other than being colored differently, the Fritos mini-monsters had the exact same plastic mold. The more significant change that they made was to the names of each monster. Instead of the original scarier monster names, they went with names that were a bit more family friendly. The monsters now had names such as "Batty Bertha", "Bony Tony", and "Few Manchew"... basically, the kind of names you'd expect to see on Garbage Pail Kids trading cards.
Believe it or not, one of the figures who was originally named "Evil Executioner" was actually changed to "Gay Blade" (no relation to the old Zorro flick). It's funny how a simple name change can make a character sound so completely innocent - even if he's wearing an executioner's hood, holding a knife in one hand and a severed head in the other. If you changed Charles Manson's name to "Skippy Bippy", I guarantee you'd feel inclined to let him run a child daycare center rather than keep him locked away in prison.
Naturally, I had to have this particular mini-monster with the amazing name and I tried tracking down the old orange Fritos version of him for years. Well my friends, I finally did it. I am now the happy gay owner of Gay Blade!
I was curious about what his blade would actually do to somebody if they were stabbed by it. I mean, being stabbed doesn't sound like a particularly happy experience, but Gay Blade sure makes me think it might be. Rather than be a guinea pig and have him stab me, I decided to leave him alone with a Brachs Mellowcreme Pumpkin to see what would happen. When I returned, I was shocked to see what Gay Blade had done. Hit the jump to see what happened: (more...)
You should all know by now that Freddy Krueger was recently added to the roster of playable characters in the latest Mortal Kombat game. Talk about something that's loooooong overdue. If there was anybody worthy of being in a deadly fighting game, it has to be Freddy. I'm sure you remember seeing him pulling all kinds of martial arts moves on Jason Voorhees in their showdown towards the end of Freddy vs. Jason, so Mortal Kombat character purists be damned... this makes perfect sense to me.
What doesn't make sense is why they chose to use Freddy from the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street to base the character model on, instead of the classic Robert Englund version that we all love. Hell, at the very least, they could offer a free downloadable "Classic Freddy" costume for those of us who want to play him that way since they have a variety of custom costumes for every other character in the game. Freddy also now has two gloves instead of his traditional one, but that's a very minor gripe... and a nitpicky one at that.
Once you look past the complaints that any hardcore Freddy fan would make, playing as him is a blast. He gets super bloody with all the slashing going on in each round, they gave him his own storyline for the challenge ladder, his Fatalities are amusing as hell to watch, and you haven't lived until you've seen a Babality performed on Freddy. Not bad for a five dollar download.
Obviously, the one thing every horror and gaming fan wants now is for them to add Jason Voorhees to the game so we can finally take control of them both and have our own gory 2-player battles. Frankly, they'd be absolute fools not to put Jason (and other horror film characters) in the game. With Halloween right around the corner, they're sitting on a goldmine if they'd just give us fans what we really want.
Speaking of fans, I have to mention that there is a fan-made horror fighting game called TerrorDrome and it's an absolutely fantastic project that some annoying film studio lawyers sadly put the kibosh on. Still, the screenshots and videos from the project are on the official site and it's really worth checking out. I'm dead serious when I say that it is the one game that every horror fan has always dreamed of: a fighting game that allows you to pick your favorite horror icon and go head to head with all the other big horror movie baddies including Michael Myers, Chucky, Jason Voorhees, Pinhead, Leatherface and even the Tall Man. I still hope they fine a way to "leak" the game onto the web, because too much work has been put into it to never see the light of day. It's a labor of love and they're not trying to profit from it.
SURVEY: What are some other horror characters that you'd like to see in Mortal Kombat and what would their Fatality be?
Also, hit the jump to see a video of all the Fatalities that Freddy Krueger can perform in Mortal Kombat... (more...)
[Click here to watch in hi-res]
So while we're on tour rushing to the next town for another Keith Apicary show, we're doing our best to take advantage of what little downtime we have. After we left Portland, we decided to head up to Astoria, Oregon to pay a visit to the house from The Goonies.
Once we entered the town, it quickly felt like we were driving around the Goon Docks and I was expecting to see some kids riding past us on their bicycles about to go on an adventure. But today, the adventure was ours, for we were heading up to that classic house. When we pulled up, there was this fantastic custom made sign letting people know they had arrived at a cinematic landmark. What's nice is that the current owners are totally cool with people walking up their driveway and taking pictures of the house. The place has been maintained really well over the years and the views of the water and town down below made me want to move in immediately. Of course, it could've used some Rube Goldberg contraptions to really sweeten the experience, but it was still great finally seeing the place in person.
Afterward, we decided to drive out to the beach with the huge rocks near the Fratellis' hideout in the film. What's funny is that it takes about 45 minutes to drive a car from the house to the beach, so it's funny imagining The Goonies actually doing that bike ride. I guarantee Mikey, Chunk, Data and Mouth would've croaked or been hit by a speeding car long before reaching that beach. Ah movie magic...
Cannon Beach was completely overcast that day, so it even felt like we were reliving scenes from the film, but holy crap.... Haystack Rock was ENORMOUS! No photos or movies can possibly do it any justice, and all I can say is that the people of Astoria are seriously lucky to live near such a spectacle.
We finished shooting some video and then truffle shuffled our way out onto the long, winding roads towards Tacoma. But before we reached our next show destination, there was another special stop we planned on making, so you can expect to hear about that one soon enough. So stick around and don't ride up Troy's Bucket, there are more adventures on the way for all you Goonies to enjoy.
By the way, be sure to watch the above video in its entirety even after the credits, I think you'll get a kick out of it.
When Halloween rolls around, I start looking around for horror movies to feature on the site. Finding the good ones used to be a big hassle, but that was before I discovered a new feature on IMDB: plot keywords.
The plot keywords feature is a list of words and phrases that sum up the many different parts of a film's plot. In theory. In practice, what you have is a list that starts out with a few important phrases, but then grows as people add more and more words to the list until every pointless detail in the movie is documented. For example, the list for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone includes keywords like "chess," "breakfast," and "untucked shirt flap". In all fairness, the state of the uniforms at Hogwarts did weigh pretty heavily on the plot.
But seeing all these ridiculous lists gave me an idea for a little quiz.
I'll give you a handful of different plot keywords that describe a horror movie that we've featured on the site at one point or another, and you have to guess which one! Sounds easy, right? Well wipe that smirk off your face because things are about to get real. Real SCARY!
Let's start off with an easy one:
- Hot Pants
- Lesbian Kiss
- Wrestler
Give up? It's...
Okay, okay, let's do a tougher one now:
- Dead Boy
- Bar Brawl
- Chemical
- Motel
- Mutant
This one's much more recent. It's...
Personally, I think they should take "mutant" out of the list and replace it with "budget zombie", but let's move on:
- Old Man
- Crude Humor
- Escape
- Quest
- Pink Car
That last one's a dead giveaway...
I ask you, what is so crude about having three different shots of a man crying out as his private parts are electrocuted?
All right, I feel bad about the last two being so obvious. For the next one, let's get a little obtuse:
- Aquarium
- Cleaning
- Kicked in the Crotch
- Father Son Relationship
- Solidarity
It sounds so familiar, doesn't it? That's because it's...
Remember that great scene at the aquarium where father and son join together to kick the janitor in the balls? Takashi Miike is a genius!
Okay, this is the final film. These keywords are tough, so you've got seven hints instead of just five:
- Siren
- Evil Man
- Argument
- Enemy
- Teamwork
- Food Wrapper
- Hat
If you didn't guess as "teamwork", you definitely got it with "food wrapper". It's...
Oh sure, you might think those were bad hints for a movie so focused on a single idea that the one-word title says it all, but aren't they? The Leprechaun was an evil little man who was an enemy to Jennifer Aniston and friends, he was wearing a hat, their arguments gave way to teamwork, the police arrived at the end, and... you know... somebody ate some fast food? Look, I don't remember every single scene, but there had to be one food wrapper somewhere in the movie. Otherwise, how would it wind up a plot keyword?
So the first stop on the Keith Apicary "Apicarnage" tour was Portland, Oregon at Ground Kontrol arcade. This is an arcade I had been wanting to see since before I even moved out to the West coast, so I was pretty excited to check it out. What I had completely forgotten about was that Portland is also home to what may be the greatest donut shop on earth: Voodoo Doughnut.
As soon as I arrived there, I knew it had to be a pretty good place since there were people lined up around the block just to get inside. Normally, I wouldn't spend 45 minutes waiting to get a box of donuts, but sometimes exceptions must be made. After all, this is a place that serves everything from bleeding voodoo doll donuts to ones covered in Captain Crunch cereal and more.
And it's not as if you're without entertainment while waiting outside. When you're not being asked for spare change from one of the seemingly thousands of homeless people who live within a square mile, you can laugh at the innuendo on the Voodoo signs such as "Good things come in pink boxes.", "The magic is in the hole!", "I got VD in Portland!" and more. Of course, the donut shop is stationed right next to a theater that apparently prides itself on showcasing hentai films late at night. Bubblegum flavored donuts and tentacle rape? That's a hell of a combo.
Once inside, the smell of those delicious donuts hits you and you can't help but order far more of them than you'll ever have time to finish. I picked up a nice variety of flavors including cotton candy, bubblegum, grape, Captain Crunch and some standard vanilla sprinkled ones. So far, they've been as delicious as they were in my dreams, and I can only assume that a voodoo priest cast a spell upon these donuts to make them so tasty.
But let's not forget that we're currently in the midst of Halloween season here on I-Mockery and you're not here to just here about a donut shop. Sure, voodoo can be tied to Halloween with a number of horror films (Serpent and the Rainbow being my favorite), but a huge smile came over me when my eyes happened upon this:
A donut coffin. I repeat: A DONUT COFFIN! Holy crapballs, this is something they actually sell!? Believe it or not, for $100 you can get a coffin filled with an assortment of Voodoo donuts. How incredible is that? Sure, it's completely overpriced and you could spend roughly $60 less and get the same number of donuts without a coffin, but it just wouldn't feel the same. We were tempted to get a donut coffin for ourselves, but the tour wagon is already so tightly packed that we're lucky to be able to fit in it with a regular box of donuts. Still, if I lived anywhere near Voodoo Doughnut, you can bet your finest jack-o-lantern that I'd be picking up a donut coffin to use as one hell of a centerpiece for a Halloween party come October.
Donut chains around the globe could certainly learn a thing or two from Voodoo Doughnut... they simply do everything right.
Before I go, I wanted to say thanks to the fans of I-Mockery and the fans of Keith Apicary for coming out to the Ground Kontrol and making it such a great first stop on the tour. It was great meeting everyone and we can only hope that the rest of the tour is even half as fun. Big thanks to the staff at Ground Kontrol too - their arcade is absolutely amazing and you can tell a lot of love went into everything in it from the game selection right down to the floor tiles in the bathroom that make it look like a Pac-Man screen. I'll be sure to post some pics of Ground Kontrol when I get a chance.
Now we're headed up to do a show in Tacoma, Washington (though by the time this blog post goes live, it will already be over) but have a few special stops to make along the way before getting there. More on that later. Hope you've all been enjoying the Halloween season updates on I-Mockery so far... we have loads more on the way, so stick around like the bloodthirsty goblins you know you are.