Wal Mart 2017!

Wal Mart's Halloween is usually slim pickings, but by nearly the end of the season, they often manage to scrape by with one short article's worth of pure gold....

First, This Awesome Signage

These signs at Wal Mart are amazing. Look at them. They're sheet ghosts with teeth. Teeth and eye sockets, just pale enough that they come across as parts of a huge skull seen through their gauzy cloth exterior. I would love to have one of these. I ask probably every year if anybody has a way of getting me any store signage and I've yet to ever find a lead.

PERFECTLY Bendy Snake

This is just about the bendiest bendy snake I've probably ever experienced. It's soft enough to twist into truly any wiggly shape you can imagine, but just stiff enough to hold that shape completely. Most bendable things fail at either one or the other, most often failing at the softness part, but not this one, and it's a skeleton cobra to boot! It doesn't have the individual ribs of the larger skeletal snake available from Target every year now, but that's a small price to pay for benditude of this caliber.

A Googly-Eyed Skelemingo

I've seen my share of skeleton lawn flamingos, the coolest being those that are actually sculpted into skeletons, rather than merely painted. Of the merely painted variety, however, Wal Mart's 2017 edition is superior to others by way of having googly eyes as beady and soulless and weird as the actual eyes of actual hilarious birds.

Inflatable Monster Outhouse

Of all the things I've ever seen Frankenstein's monster doing, this is probably the first one that feels genuinely monstrous. Not only does he KNOW he's tying up the only bathroom, but he's going to wipe his ass with the same person desperately waiting to go. He's fully self-aware of how horrible this is, too, and he is delighted. I had no idea he was the most evil of the classic monsters all along.

"Maskimals"

This is one of Walmart.com's own photos of these things, which actually went up for sale in late July or early August and are quite possibly not Halloween-exclusive. They're also not really my thing in general, but it feels like a mass-produced mascot-style fuzzy animal mask was a ridiculously long time coming, the kind of product there was already probably a market for all along, and I think that's true even completely outside the whole "furry" thing.

Anyway, the real reason I needed to bring these up is because my introduction to them consisted of a couple in the store arguing fiercely over what exactly the sloth mask was supposed to be, apparently not knowin what a sloth looks like at a glance. The husband was sure it was a raccoon, while the wife though it was a chipmunk, or something. I was too shy to interject, and they seemed pretty pissed off about it enough.

Inflatable Crawling Pumpkin

While giant, inflatable pumpkins are pretty common, this one is interesting both for dragging itself around on clawed arms and for apparently having a body behind it. I can't find photographs of it in any other position so I don't really know, but I certainly like the impression this angle is giving me of a pumpkin-headed blob-thing with arms.

Halloween Blob Gushers

I don't usually review candy, for some reason, and these are really just like any other gushers, but the packaging has an absolutely beautiful blob monster on it, formed from the disgusting cough medicine that fills these rancid nuggets of waxy corn syrup.

Wait, now I remember why I don't review candy. If it's any kind of fruit-flavored candy, I pretty much can't stomach even putting it in my mouth.

Extra Large Solar Monsters!

I know you can't tell in my video, but these are easily twice the size of competing solar monsters, and you can see just how elaborate they are. The ghost hangs merrily off his own wooden coffin with a happy pumpkin and an eyeless cat to keep him company, the mummy has a spider pal and an unusually tiny tombstone while he rocks out, and the skeleton basically has everything you could want: a melting candle in his hand, a floppy hat, broken chains and even a dancing, purple rat, all while burrowing up out of his own grave! ...Or is he embedded in cement? I don't know. He's pretty happy about it anyway.

New 2017 Tie-Up Monsters

The first time I saw this category of flimsy, plastic decoration, I found them a lot funnier and more fetishistic than they were probably intended to be, and maybe that's ENTIRELY on me, but that still hasn't changed. I mean, look at the witch this time.

Like, holy SHIT is she pumped for this. Good lord. Calm the hell down.