All Nerd Review is here to tell you that your costume sucked this year. It totally, totally did, and you should be ashamed. Sure, this article is coming AFTER Halloween, but if I'd written it before, that would have been like naming your ugly child BEFORE you even managed to impregnate your bewildered girlfriend. You gotta have the pleasure 'fore the pain, my friends, and laughing at you is unadulterated pleasure.

Do I sound grouchy? I'm grouchy on every holiday. You should read the Valentines Day articles, or that ill-fated Christmas article that I was too depressed to even finish but posted anyhow. You are here to witness the slow mental decay of your friendly webmaster. Arbor Day abhorrence to Boxing Day belligerence; I like to combine them both into one day and just go out punching trees. Holiday festivities this year involved carving a robot pumpkin that was so bad that I'm not even going to humiliate myself by showing you, eating a peanut butter cup, and watching the Halloween Party at work come and go with the collective sticky fingers of 50 children (which amounted to more or less 492 fingers, here in the woodchipper-and-coyote rife backwoods). The party contained 3 Batmen, 2 Spider-Men, 2 Darth Vaders and one fairly convincing pre-pubescent Catwoman. At one point, a small child took off his tiger mask, put it on a Darth Vader and loudly announced 'now you're Darth Vader Tiger!'.

O, I had grand plans to stay up all night and watch endless bad horror flicks, ill-chosen from dollar bins across the tri-state area, and draw a cadre of monsters as I watched. Instead, I fell asleep right before the end of 'I Bury the Living' after drawing approximately zero monsters and eating approximately 12 pierogies.

Embracing terror just doesn't seem as beautiful after working until 8 PM, because after that... nothing's going to get through that thick veneer of self-defensive mucous that I create against the anemones of life, like a clownfish, but without the cute name. So, again, I existed costumeless, unless for some reason you consider slippers stitched together with carpet thread to be some kind of avant garde costumey thing. In which case, I rocked the block. But your costume still sucked, and here is why.

Halloween costumes have reached a dark and unhappy point where even the most remote approximation of the object of your effigy passes as a costume. That's the trouble with most of these, and this year, I'll be concentrating on the superhero / sci-fi / untouchable nerd genre. Any Trek fan knows who this is, or who it's supposed to be, by some stretch of the imagination, if Lieutenant Commander Worf Rozhenko / Son of Mogh were white and had just been caught in a pudding fight. Alas, the Klingon race is as brown-skinned as aliens come, and also fight with bat'leth swords. Not pudding.

Here's another example of a Klingon, which is significantly more rewarding than the previous example. I can let the foam armor pass, but ONLY because of the race-accurate spikes on the shoes, and the poor budget of The Next Generation in the early seasons had produced costumes that were pretty much exactly like this anyhow. You can tell that this is a Next Generation Klingon because Original Series Klingons were just angry black guys, sans ridges. I do doubt, however, that any self-respecting Klingon would let himself be photographed while his eyebrows were in such ridiculous disarray. Eyebrows are not usually perpendicular to each other, in my experience. Klingons are a fair choice for a Halloween costume if you must be something Trek, because who wants to be a Bolian? Blue-faced and with a giant crease bisecting your whole body? I think not.

When attempting to create a resemblance to a fantasy creature, it's usually wise to keep it within the realm of 'plausibly recreatable'. A Klingon shouldn't be too far off from possible, since real, human actors play them on the TV. Slap on some brow-ridges, a fake beard and you're set. If you're going to go far enough out of your way to suck THIS BAD, you deserve a razorblade in your Snickers. Klingons eat razors to make themselves tough anyhow. That'll learn ya. It's the things that you can't possibly recreate with a human body that bother me.

For example, Nightmare Before Christmas costumes. Sally costume? Totally hot. Who wouldn't want to make out with a ragdoll chick who can reassign her own body parts to different anatomical locations? Jack Skellington? Unless you're 13 feet tall and have some kind of Daliesque skinny-bone disease, I don't want to see chubby little dwarf Skellingtons on my doorstep. It's not good enough, people. I need to make this clear.

Also, the non-mask option just makes you look like an absolute tool. 100% tool.

Chewbacca is another Halloween favorite, like it or not. The child pictured at left, however, believes himself to be a scary Wolfman, as evidenced by his stellar acting skills. 'Raaarrgh!' he says. 'Fear my man-purse... and my lycanthropic disorder also!'

Sure, I can understand the difficulty of obtaining a true full-body faux fur outfit, as well as the discomfort that it would cause, but I cannot accept a fur-patterned pantsuit as a 'fair approximation', especially when your plastic head is a completely different color than your body. So, to anyone who wants to be Chewbacca next Halloween, either do it right or stick to something that you can pull off, like being a whiny moisture farmer from Tatooine. Accessories needed : floppy hat, bedsheet and moccasins. Done.

We start to reach a closer approximation to 'reality' on some of these superhero costumes, because nothing says 'my parents are too saturated in liquor to care' like a hard plastic, strap-on face mask. If you're going to be Captain America, you NEED to have a shield, head-wings, a full-head mask and those boots with the enormous cuffs on them. And what do we have here?

A passable Captain America. I might give this guy three or four Twix if he came to my doorstep, but muscle costumes on children are just inherently creepy. This is especially creepy when every foamy bulge is relegated to the upper body. One cannot fight crime with pecs alone. On the converse of that...

... maybe at least one muscle, on the entirety of the costume OR the wearer might not be such a bad thing. The only thing that this guy is doom to is the potato chip supply of greater Wisconsin.

This brings up an interesting question. What does the plus-size person do for Halloween? Here I am making jokes about our lovely Dr. Doom spelling death for the Fantastic Four FOOD GROUPS and being completely insensitive. I've seen an amazing 350-pound Batman in my day, so it's not impossible, but there's a certain irony and self-deprecating awareness necessary when attempting to impersonate a character from an idealized world with a non-ideal body, which is something that 95% of us, including myself, are owners of. The husky should not be relegated to only 'fat' comic characters like the Blob, and... that guy in the Flash comics with the black hole in his stomach. He was fat, right? And Detective Harvey Bullock. I think that covers all of the chunky comic characters. The spectrum of fantasy obesity is a narrow one, ironically. My suggestion? Be something original. To all of you - BE SOMETHING ORIGINAL OR ACCURATE. Either way. Chunky C3PO? NO WAY. Here's a small gallery of things not to do.

Don't do these things. Ghost Rider, you may be a more convincing spirit of vengeance that Nicholas Cage could EVER be in the upcoming movie, but the cardinal rule of Halloween costuming is that you should NOT wear a costume that has what you are written across the chest. That's like having the proverbial mittens pinned to your jacket and a juice box with the pointy end of the straw filed down you you don't hurt yourself. And by the way, Nick Cage is a Spirit of Wearing a Ring with a Bracelet that has a Chain Between Them and Thinking it's Cool. On the other hand, take off the words and this would make a bitchin' Rue McClanahan costume. And Iron Man... you're a fair Iron Man, but you're still standing upright, which means that you haven't consumed nearly enough alcohol to wear that costume.

Don't do these things. The only thing creepier than fake muscles under a costume is fleshy exposed faux-arm muscles. And the only thing successively creepier than THAT is a full body of fake muscles, severe ichthyosis and an angry face on the top of Mt. Ugly. Also, try adding real fire to your costume for that authentic feel and advance the cause of natural selection for creation science everywhere. If the Human Torch has taught us anything, it's that fire can make you fly! And that last kid? The Spectacular Spider-Ass? Why he has a partially green costume is beyond me. At what point did Marvel start pimping out their thousandth Spider-Man action figure variant in full-body costume form?

Actually, that wouldn't be such a bad concept for a truly geeky costume. Take a generic Batman costume, give him a necktie, some purple legwarmers and a handful of jalapeno peppers and you'll totally have the last Batman action figure that fell out of Mattel's gaping skull cavity. Spicy Calisthenic Casual Friday Batman. You can pretty much combine any three non-sequiturs into a completely plausible Batman action figure, and the less plausible as an actual costume for Batman, the better! Anti-Piracy Hydrocephalic Monocle Batman is a personal favorite of mine. Marvel, you've disappointed me in your costuming. DC, how will you fare?

.....

Where does one draw the line between Halloween costume and oh my god? I'll tell you where. Right exactly here. You'll get no ornery comments from me, just low, excited whimperings.

Hellboy costumes are another ridiculously disappointing thing. Sideshow Toys has created some incredible, functional prop replicas from the movie, including the Samaritan gun and the giant stone hand, so you have no excuse to not have those covered. Being a crazy Hellboy fanatic, I'll accept nothing less that stellar when it comes to a Hellboy costume, but of all of the variations of it remain painfully suck.

If you're happy with a cheap plastic Jedi robe and a printed-on belt, then I hope you're happy with your staggering mediocrity and churrito assembling skills.

Halloween is a special day, people. It is an ancient celebration of the walls between our world and the intangible spirit world getting very thin. Suddenly, the ghosts are banging on these walls and saying 'keep it down over there! I work at 4 friggin' AM!', and we say 'oh, okay man, sorry' and we turn it down. According to the Jeremiah Project, Halloween "does not have even one single redeeming virtue. It is custom born out of pagan superstition. It is a demon-inspired, devil-glorifying, occult festival. It is an evening holy unto evil, death, and divination." This is even MORE reason to fly the good ship Halloween into the sun and explode in a blaze of glory! Sure, you might be saying 'but you didn't even wear a costume! How dare you criticize me!' I'd rather kick Halloween's ass that half-ass my way through it.

So let this be a warning. Your costume sucked. You 'dead cheerleaders' and 'football players' and 'ghetto thugs', you store-bought bastardizations of iconic characters, you who think it's okay to wear jeans with a Batman costume.... I'm watching you.

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