We hope your Halloween is one filled with tricks and treats! Thanks to Scott, one of our readers who sent in this awesome pictures of a Dawn of the Dead pumpkin he created.

It’s back…

This week we managed to find two new Halloween beverages: Jones Soda Monster Mojito and Izze Halloween Blackberry. I’m a big fan of moijtos, so I was pretty excited to try Monster Mojito. Surprisingly I was not disappointed. Jones does a decent job of distilling the flavors of lime, mint, and rum into a bottled beverage. It’s quite refreshing.

Izze Halloween Blackberry comes in a cool black can, but actually pours out a nice shade of purple. Izze touts itself as “pure fruit juice and sparkling water” “fortified with vitamins”. It’s not bad – tastes somewhere between a wine cooler and that punch people made when I was a kid by mixing Hi-C with 7-up. The flavor is quite unique and I can’t imagine what kind of food it would go with.

We found these gummy skulls over at The Rocket. They’re a local candy/gift shop with a pretty large selection of zombie stuff up on their website so make sure to check them out. The gummy skulls were a bit tough to chew, but the flavor was awesome. With hints of citrus and raspberry it had both Erin and I wishing we hadn’t left them sit out long enough to get so tough.

These Candy Potion Powders were found at a Target store and comes in three flavors, all mostly indistinguishable from each other. The powders are chalky in texture and dissolve readily in the mouth. Wracking my brain for something to compare them to, I realized they taste exactly like crushed up Smarties. I think these would serve best as an accessory for an Amy Winehouse costume – just add a mirror and razorblade.

Chef Ghoulicious Zit Poppers are another amazing piece of candy technology. There is a clear gummy base with a thin membrane at the top which holds a liquid cherry syrup. The idea is that they can be popped and “bleed” like a zit. To be honest I was dreading these, but it was surprisingly tolerable. The amount of syrup in each candy is very small and not overbearing. Obviously this candy is more of a novelty item than food, but it’s one of the few novelty candies that had a decent taste.

Halloween is the only holiday where you can find so many candies that come with mini costumes, and I’m a sucker for them all. This Vampire Fangs with Oozing Orange Tart Tongue includes a pair of fake vampire teeth and an oversized gummy tongue. The tongue was textured realistically and had an overwhelming orange flavor.

Finally we tried Sheila’s Delights Gummy Brains. Despite coming in both a blue and a pink variety, both colors tasted the same. They have a delicious cherry flavor and were the softest of any gummys we’ve tasted to date. Absolutely awesome.

That’s it for this year’s Halloween candy reviews! We had a fun time doing it and hope that you enjoyed reading about our tasting adventures.

This week – a very special edition of Halloween Candy Reviews…

We started this week like we start every other week with a special edition Halloween beverage – Spooookiwi from Jones Soda.

I don’t know if I would call it a kiwi flavor – it’s almost a green apple and very similar in taste to Week 1′s Dread Apple. The soda was almost clear with a hint of a green tinge to it and plenty sweet, but not overly so. I could actually drink an entire glass of it which is pretty impressive as far as Jones Soda goes.

Kraft Jet-Puffed GhostMallows are a fun, spooky take on a familiar favorite. Each bag comes with white, orange, and brown ghost-shaped marshmallows. Unfortunately, the colors do not represent different flavors. I was really hoping the brown ones would be chocolate flavored but sadly they tasted the same as the white and orange ones. For Erin this came as a relief. “I just want regular old marshmallows,” she said. At 99 cents a bag, these are a cheap way to put the spirit of Halloween in your hot chocolate.

Our next item comes from our friends at our favorite local candy shop, The Rocket. These are sour gummy bats. They are pretty decently sized and taste like a mix of Sunkist Fruit Gems and SourPatch Kids. They are a good balance between sweet, sour, and fruity flavor. We both loved these and will be going back for more.

Finally we come to another item from The Rocket – Gummy Flesh Fries. Finger shaped gummies in a french fry box. We had a lot of fun with these: (warning – possibly NSFW pictures)

The fun came to an end when it was time to eat them. I felt like I was eating a piece of record vinyl. It had very strong plastic taste. I couldn’t even swallow it and had to spit it out. Erin followed suit.

When I was a boy one of my favorite things to do was make my own haunted houses in the attic. My friends and brothers would help build elaborate props and we would figure out ways to scare the pants off our parents. (Unfortunately they were the only ones who ever saw our masterpieces.)

The spook house continues to allure me and I’m always surprised that an entire industry exists to make animatronic vampires, ghouls, and zombies for use in Haunted Houses. These props are usually ultra-corny and so noisy no one would ever mistake them for the real thing, yet they hold an odd charm. So here are some of the best, worst, and strangest I’ve seen:

The Buzz Saw: Great in theory, but in practice it’s kind of silly. First of all, the body is already cut in half before the saw starts. Obviously in a haunted house it would need to be performed over and over again, but if that’s the case perhaps a scene where someone is cut in half is a bit ambitious.

Stone Master Gargoyle: There is a local party supply shop that has one of these so I’ve gotten the opportunity to see it several times in action. It’s mildly impressive, but not exactly frightening. Here’s why: this prop costs over $8000. So naturally it is used as a show-off piece when it would be better served as a background prop.

Cool Jerk: Mommy please don’t let the obviously rubber man touch me.

Death Chamber: This is actually pretty scary – if you watch the video for it there is a little jump at the end that would probably make me crap my pants.

Haunted Vanity: Personally, I prefer the haunted curio cabinet.

Here’s something I’ve never done before on this site – revealed my favorite zombie movies. These are the zombie films I keep coming back to over and over again.

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968): The original zombie movie still has the ability to scare the crap out of me. I’ll never forget the first time I saw this while I was home alone late at night.
2. Dawn of the Dead (2004): I’m sure some of our readers will call me a heretic with this one, but I can’t deny the fact that I friggin’ love this movie. It’s frenetic pace and over the top action just make me smile.
3. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
4. Zombi 2: Fulchi’s masterpiece never gets old, and I delight in showing this to people who’ve never heard of it. They all become fans after seeing it.
5. Re-Animator: To me, this is one of the funniest movies of all time.
6. Shaun of the Dead
7. 28 Weeks Later: The Helicopter scene – ’nuff said.
8. Hard Rock Zombies
9. Plan 9 from Outer Space
10. American Zombie

It’s Undead Monday where we bring you an article from ZRC’s short history that you may have missed the first time around. This week’s undead post lets us show off our Zombie Reporter from Monster by Mail one more time:

When I was a kid I was obsessed with Freddy Kruger. A Nightmare on Elm Street was released I was only 5 years old so although I knew who Freddy Kruger was I never got the chance to see him until now.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a story of a group of teenagers who are chased by a psycho who is killing them in their dreams. As the deaths start killing off her friends, Nancy becomes increasingly anxious and stays awake for days on end to avoid dreaming. Finally she develops a plan to take Freddy out of the dream world so that he can be captured.

This movie plays with the idea of how nightmares can feel so real and employs various techniques to make the viewer feel like they are in a dream world where things don’t always make sense. At times this works and it is scary, but other times in the movie it just comes across as corny. I didn’t find it terribly frightening but Erin said it was one of the scariest movies she’s ever seen. However I rarely remember my dreams whereas she frequently experiences nightmares. Your own experience may also determine how scary this movie is.

Overall I felt it was an OK movie, but if I was younger I think it might have had more of an impact on me. Erin loved the journey it took her on and how it played into the nightmares she already experienced.

It’s FX FRIDAY, where we bring you a brand new how-to video every week throughout October. In this episode, Jef Porkins shows us how to use liquid latex and toilet paper to create rotting zombie skin.

It’s time again for Halloween Candy Reviews! The contenders:

Our beverage selection for the evening was Jones’ Soda Buried Pomegrante It had a nice rosy color. Erin says “I thought it was a pretty muted taste but still very sweet, as are all the jones sodas.” The flavor was nice though. It’s mildly fruity and if it had less of a sugary-sweet taste it would probably be quite good. Easily the best Halloween drink we’ve tasted so far

Our next candy is from a line made for Target stores and has the whimsical title of Floating Body Parts in Edible Liquid Goo If looks were everything, this product gets an A+. The body parts are gummy and nicely detailed. The detail is so great that the foot is a fleshy color and turns to red when you reach the ankle where it was “cut” off. Unfortunately it was absolutely vomit inducing. The “liquid goo” is essentially corn syrup with a small amount of flavoring and food coloring. The gummies are tough to chew through and tasteless. However, if I was a child I would love it. It’s exactly the kind of thing I would have loved as a kid. As an adult, I threw up a little in my mouth.

SweetTarts Spooky Jelly Beans are holiday-bending treats that take that sweet and sour flavor and apply it to jelly beans. They were ok. There are only two flavors and they are barely distinguishable from each other so it gets old quickly. Erin said, “I feel like it could have been executed better – not really tart enough to live up to the name.” I guess if you don’t like them you can always give them away at Easter and no one’s the wiser.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday and I suspect that is the same story for many of our readers. For reasons that may be unexplainable, we’ve always been drawn to the dark and the macabre. But over the last few years I’ve started to notice that Halloween is slowly eroding away, which is why I came up with this list of 4 Halloween traditions that need to stop now.

1. Stop calling it a “Harvest Party”: In my day, conservative religious types who didn’t like Halloween just stayed at home with the lights off on October 31st. Somewhere along the line they decided to start holding “harvest parties” that just happened to coincide on the same day. This is nothing new, in fact Christmas is based on a pagan holiday too. Changing the name doesn’t make it any different. Besides, we already have a harvest party – it’s called Thanksgiving.
2. Stop putting those stupid inflatable pumpkins in your yard: Really these things are the pinnacle of laziness. Is carving a real pumpkin that difficult? Some of my favorite Halloween memories involve carving pumpkins with my family and I shudder to think in the future kids will look back on that time Dad dragged the extension cord out of the garage and plugged in the pumpkin. This also goes for inflatable silly ghosts, inflatable tombstones (really?), inflatable cauldrons, and inflatable Winnie the Pooh next to a cauldron.
3. Stop with the slutty costumes: What is up with women’s costumes? Sexy witch, sexy pirate, sexy cowgirl, sexy french maid, and on and on… Do they all need to be “sexy”? Women can be scary too!
4. Stop driving your kids from door to door: Honestly it would not kill them (or you) to get a little exercise. Even here in Michigan where it’s not unheard of to be snowing on Halloween it’s never THAT bad.

How about the rest of you? What things about Halloween have been bothering you?