Halloween | Cavalcade of Awesome

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!!! I survive Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights!!

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Florida, Halloween, Halloween Horror Nights, holiday, Orlando, reviews, roadtrip, Universal Studios with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Florida, Halloween, Halloween Horror Nights, holiday, Orlando, travel, Universal Studios on October 15, 2008 by Paxton

Welcome to Week 3 of AWESOME-tober-fest!!! Hope you’ve enjoyed the first two weeks so far. I started off week 1 talking about creepy Halloween sodas. Then, on week 2, I discussed a few of my favorite scary movies. What’s on deck for this week? Well, as teased to you at the end of last week’s article, Steph and I took the plunge and went to our first Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights this past weekend. Universal Studios theme parks hold this event annually and this year marked the 18th year they have done it. I’ve been wanting to go since we moved down to Jacksonville but we never did and thanks to some cheap, discounted tickets at work, we were able to do it this year. In case you didn’t know, ever since around 1990, during the Halloween season, Universal Studios closes its doors (along with Islands of Adventure) around 5:30 – 6pm and clears out all the people. Universal then sets up the scare zones and haunted houses and opens the doors again for people who bought Halloween Horror Nights tickets (yes, it’s a separate ticket). There are as many as 8 haunted houses that are setup in various parts of the park as well as what are called scare zones. In these scare zones are park employees who dress up in scary costumes and follow around patrons trying to creep them out or scare them. Like the haunted houses, each scare zone has a different theme, usually based around what haunted house is near it. Halloween Horror Nights usually has an overall theme each year, too. Last year, with Freddy, Jason and Leatherface it was called the Carnival of Carnage. The year before that they did a “best of” theme with all the best haunted houses and scare zones from the years prior. This year, the overall theme was Bloody Mary; which included famous myths, legends and fairy tales. Bloody Mary is the spririt that would appear to you in a mirror if you said her name 3 times. She’s in the picture below on the right.

It’s a pretty cool theme if you ask me and I was very excited to see what Universal did with it. So, after work on Friday, the wife and I took off for Orlando and our scary Halloween adventure. Continue reading →

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!! Some of my favorite scary movies

Posted in Alfred Hitchock, AWESOME-tober-fest, Halloween, holiday, humor, movies, pop culture, reviews with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Halloween, holiday, movie review, movies, pop culture on October 7, 2008 by Paxton

Welcome back to Week 2 of AWESOME-tober-fest. Last year I did an article telling you guys about some of my favorite scary books. It surprisingly became fairly popular and has been seeing steady traffic. So, this Halloween (AKA AWESOME-tober-fest) I thought I’d list out some of my favorite scary movies.

Now, this won’t be a “scariest movies of all time list”, that’s too easy. This list is gonna be typically Pax-centric. It’s all about what I like, my friends. That’s the only way I can work, ALL ABOUT ME. So this list will consist of movies that I really enjoy watching but not ones that I would consider the greatest Horror/Monster movies of all time. You can Google “Greatest Horror Movies” and literally get thousands of results if that’s what you are looking for, but this list will be a bit more nuanced. And by “nuanced”, I mean “stuff Pax likes”. If that is also your definition of nuanced, then you’ve come to the right blog.

I’ve put this list in chronological order. Let us begin.

Dial ‘M’ For Murder (1954) – A Hitchcock classic. This one really ratchets up the suspense (well, it is Hitchcock). Also, Grace Kelly is beautiful and wonderful as always. I prefer her in Rear Window, however, as she has more to do because, make no mistake, this is Ray Milland’s picture. Oh my lord, this guy is the balls. Cold, calculating, smart. He never once loses his calm demeanor despite being grilled by a Sherlock Holmes wanna-be detective. Ray Milland plays a husband who recruits a man to kill his wife (Grace Kelly). He has everything planned down to the last detail but something goes wrong and he must try to frame another man for the attempt. The script for this was originally a theatrical play, and you can tell by how the cameras were setup and everything was filmed. Also, it was originally released in 3-D, which not many people know, and I got to see it that way on the big screen at the Alabama Theater during Halloween 2003, I believe. This is a great movie.

Psycho (1960) – Hitchcock, again, at his best. Anthony Perkins pulls a fantastic performance here as Norman Bates. It’s easy to see why he was typecast after this movie. His performance here is so menacing, how could he be seen as anyone else? FYI…stay away from the sequels. They are awful. Psycho II is just embarrassingly bad. Wishful thinkers tend to say that four is not bad, but they are kidding themselves. This is the only movie with ‘Psycho’ in the title worth watching (and I’m including American Psycho in that statement too).

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!! I review gallons of Halloween sodas

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda, sodapalooza on October 1, 2008 by Paxton

Happy October, everyone. How crazy is it that it’s October 2008 already? I can’t even believe it. It’s like I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my wife back in January and seeing Meredith and McDreamy break up, have sex, get back together, stop having sex, then completely ignore each other, AGAIN, put me to sleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for 6 months. I got some catching up to do.

Anyway, now that I’m back, get ready for some hardcore AWESOME to come flying at your eyes like Moe Howard and his index finger. Stand back and bask in the warm glow of your monitor and let the rays of unfiltered BAD-ASS flow from it into you. No need to fear, AWESOME-tober-fest is here. That’s right, October has begun, and with it brings the first of three themed months on the Cavalcade of Awesome. I love the final three months of the year. I theme the blog for each month. October is Halloween. November is Thanksgiving, or just fall in general. December is glorious, glorious Christmas. As you can see, I’ve done some redecorating for Halloween. The decorations are up, what do you think?

The new blog banner up top is an homage to a specific Halloween item I will be reviewing later this month. It’s something I’ve loved from my youth and just recently acquired thanks to eBay. From my October blogs of LAST year I’ve been wanting to find and review the items I’m currently speaking of but was unable to find any. I finally have them and will unleash them on you unsuspecting readers later on. I’d do it now, but I haven’t actually written the review. Besides, it’ll work better closer to Halloween.

Anywho, today I’m looking at Halloween sodas. Several have been released over the years, so I thought I’d take a look at a few. Some are old, some are new, let’s see if any made me spew. LOL…that was so awesome that I got that to rhyme. You may as well stop reading now because the article doesn’t get any better than that. Seriously, that was the pinnacle of this article. You have been warned, I can’t top that.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2007: Halloween retail goodies

Posted in candy, Elvis, Halloween with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2007, candy, Elvis Presley, Halloween, holiday, pop culture on October 31, 2007 by Paxton

I love looking around stores during Halloween. The aisles are decorated with cardboard haunted houses, pumpkins and pics of gouls, ghosts and monsters. It’s so much fun to walk around the Halloween sections of retail stores like Target, Wal-Mart and your local grocery store to see the scary versions of some regular favorites that come out every Halloween. Companies also seem to release new Halloween themed items every year. Here’s some of the coolest stuff I noticed while shopping around this Halloween season.

You can click the individual pictures for a bigger size.

I love Reese’s Cups. LOVE them. They are top of my list of snacks including Cheetos and peanut M&Ms. During Halloween Reese’s will release different shaped cups (bats, pumpkins, skulls, etc). The package says DOUBLE sized and, man, they aren’t kidding. This is one giant brick of peanut butter in a thin layer of chocolate. It’s like carrying around a small child. It easily weighed as much as my head. I had trouble finishing it. If you decide to get some of these, make sure you bring along a car trailer or a pack mule. You aren’t going to get a box of these home on your own.

M&Ms
Ahhh, another seasonal favorite for me, Pumpkin Mix M&Ms. Yes, this is just regular M&Ms dressed up as black and orange pumpkins, but I LOVE M&Ms and the packaging is always too cool to pass up (check out Yellow carving a pumpkin that looks like Red). I buy them every year (peanut are my favorite followed closely by peanut butter).

Gummy candy in the shape of human limbs seems to be pretty popular this year. The one on the left even comes in its own coffin. Nothing quite like candy that makes you feel like a cannibal. They make these things extremely realistic. Just sitting there looking at them I got a little queasy. Great, great idea, I’m glad companies are embracing the macabre during the Halloween season, but I’d be lying if I said these things don’t creep me out. Like chopped up midgets in a bag. Yikes.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2007: Some of my awesome, awesome Halloween costumes

Posted in Elvis, Halloween, personal with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2007, costumes, Elvis Presley, Halloween, holiday, pop culture on October 30, 2007 by Paxton

I have always loved Halloween. I dressed up every year until I was in 8th or 9th grade. It was so much fun wearing costumes and hanging out with my friends going from house to house getting candy. Things have certainly changed. Today, the costumes are infinitely better but you can’t go out in your neighborhood to trick-or-treat anymore because of various nefarious individuals that may (or may not) live in your area. These individuals would love nothing more than to fool you into eating an apple with a razor blade stashed inside. What sick individual gives out apples for Halloween anyway? If that happened when I was a kid that guy would have gotten his own version of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that involved nothing but toilet paper and raw eggs. Giving apples for Halloween is just WRONG, people. Write that down.

Anyway, my family was pretty good at documenting our holidays. I was going through some old photos and found some of my all-time favorite Halloween costumes. I have more pictures than this, but I may save those for another time. So, without further ado, here are some of my favorite costumes that I’ve worn throughout the years. Enjoy!

You can click each of the pictures for a bigger version.

Year Unknown – Spiderman. Yes, this is it! The Ben Cooper Spider-man costume. It doesn’t get much more vintage than this. Obviously I’m “shooting my webs” at a villain off camera. Classic, classic costume. You can find these on eBay now for anywhere between 20 and 100 bucks. Check out the boxed version of this costume here.

Year Unknown – Peter Criss (drummer for KISS). How about them jeans and JC Penney’s belt? That’s so rock-n-roll, man. I never really listened to their music, but I LOVED the whole KISS makeup gimmick. I loved they dressed up and spit fire and had these gaudy knee boots. It was awesome. And for some reason, my favorite was always Peter Criss, the drummer. I was walking home from school and found a large drink cup with a picture of Peter Criss on it and told Mom that’s who I wanted to be for Halloween. My mom was great, she used the cup as a guide for all the makeup. She did a great job, didn’t she? Years later she would do the same thing for me when I was a werewolf. She painted on wolf-like features. It was awesome, I wish I had a picture of it.

Year Unknown – Random Pirate. The costume turned out great didn’t it? My mom was great at making costumes out of crap we had around the house. Dig those funky yellow running shoes! So pirate-y. That ginormous sword was borrowed and I only held it for the picture. There was no way I was carrying that monstrosity through the neighborhood trying to collect candy. Check out my younger brother as Big Bird. Yes, yes that is embarrassing. He’s gonna love that. You can see another pic of this costume here.