The Best of Big Lots 2017

Big Lots is pretty hit or miss when it comes to Halloween; it's always got a good selection, for sure, but some years, it doesn't have a lot of items new or exclusive enough to warrant a review of its own. 2017, it seems, is one of the exceptions...

Swinging Pumpkin Ghost

This is actually a skeleton-ghost-pumpkin I've seen several times before from Wal-Mart, Dollar General and probably also Big Lots, to name a few, but this year, Big Lots decided to put it on a swing, which is adorable. It's definitely earned a break.

Giant Skeletal Dragon

If Home Depot's life-size skeletal horse is still too much for you, this dragon is slightly cheaper at only $130. It's also slightly smaller, but it's also a dragon.

Another Skeleton Fish!

It was only a Halloween or two ago that I wished for more skeletal fish during the season, and almost immediately, they began to rear their bony heads one after another. This makes over half a dozen to enter circulation since I made my simple suggestion.

Hey, you know what would also be really cool and fun for Halloween? Skeletons that give me a million dollars.

Skeleton Puppies and Kittens

I love these. They're completely wrong skeletons but they make little happy animal noises and even wag their tails. Halloween is pretty much the only time of year the average well-adjusted person is entertained by dead cats and dogs, though only as long as they're still perfectly happy cats and dogs. We don't care how much a dog decomposes without the embrace of death, we just need to know for sure that they're not sad.

Haunted Television

Surprisingly, this fake Halloween television at Big Lots is one of the few I've ever seen to play nearly this much "footage," far more elaborate than even those offered by Spirit or other major Halloween stores over the past few years. Nice job, Big Lots!

Witch Pumpkin

I like how completely lacking in explanation or reason this is. It's not a pumpkin that is a witch, something I'd find completely unsurprising, but apparently the entire disembodied head of a witch that happens to be protruding from a pumpkin, and has nothing at all to say about that situation. Maybe her head was cut off and buried this way. Maybe she was only ever a head and she likes to eat pumpkins from the inside out. Maybe pumpkins just hatch into entire fully-grown witches sometimes, head first. I don't know. We don't know. Apparently it isn't something she thinks is interesting enough to tell us.

Talking Cat Eye

Mechanical eyeballs like this have become pretty common lately, appearing in a variety of forms with all sorts of different voice clips, but this might be my favorite; others have typically been "fortune teller" themed or "haunted doorbell" themed, whereas this is JUST some sort of psychic spy-eye, straight to the point, and with a pretty sexy voice to boot.

Laughing Scarecrow

There are precisely three things to adore here:

1) The fact that this scarecrow does nothing at all but laugh.

2) The fact that the clanking sound of its plastic jaw is at least as audible as its laugh.

3) The fact that the crow squawks into the scarecrow's face between each laughing fit, as if the scarecrow is interpreting every caw as an entire brilliant joke in crow language.

Skeleton Photographer Canvas

It would make a lot more sense if this were a three-dimensional character prop, but maybe it's really supposed to be like this. It would be spooky enough if a skeleton was alive and could take your picture, but how many levels of spookery are we talking when a picture of a skeleton taking your picture is alive and can take your picture? That's at least two or three layers of hauntedness right there.

Haunted Movie Projector

How. WONDERFUL. Is this. What can I even say. Look at what this does. You could have this in your house. You could leave it on 24/7 until it runs out of batteries, then put new batteries in it, assuming you're an adult and can do what you want with your money, time and living space. If not, I just gave you a reason to go out and do something about it. Don't give up. Just keep living and growing and fighting. Do it for the dancing skeleton movie projector. Reach for the stars.