The Horrors of the Holidays: Halloween Knock-Offs

First and foremost, let it be known that Captain Cruella and myself had a righteous blast this past Thursday night at 92YTribeca and another glorious edition of Kevin Geeks Out! Silly me for thinking that this ingenious pop culture series from the mind of Kevin Maher was really dead. I mean, he said he was retiring it, but in the grand pro wrestling tradition, retired is never really retired. And thank goodness! Because KGO is truly one of my life's great joys.

Where else can I find myself amongst my fellow geeks, wallowing in the shamelessly masturbatory enjoyment of genre treasures? The theme of the night was rip-offs--and this time out, the comedy variety show featured the likes of Daily Show writer Elliott Kalan picking apart the abysmal German E.T. knock-off Nukie; the sardonically brilliant M. Sweeney Lawless condensing British Kong rip-off Konga down to its bare essentials; pop culture savant Prof. Geoff Klock analyzing Quentin Tarantino's brilliant rip-off techniques as utilized in Kill Bill; comic book blogger Nick Nadel presenting a montage of painful superhero rip-offs; filmmaker Matt Glasson rehashing his favorite Jaws copycat; and the witty artist-baker Sara Reiss regaling us with her own home-made breakfast cereal knock-offs?

And oh yeah...this time, for the first time ever, I got to join in the fun. That's right, it gave me great pleasure to take part in a show I've been enjoying for so long. As part of the night's festivities, I presented a tongue-in-cheek look at the unusual subgenre of calendar-inspired horror films that followed in the wake of John Carpenter's Halloween. I'm so proud of the finished product, in fact, that I've embedded it right here for your viewing pleasure...

I ran into some technical difficulties getting the bookend video clips to work, and so I'm simply including them here both before and after the PowerPoint itself. You can choose to watch them, or just jump right into the presentation, which is the second embedded video...

Halloween-Voiceover

More PowerPoint presentations from Brian Solomon

Thanks again to Kevin for inviting me to be a part of KGO. It was also a thrill to have a fan of the blog step out of the audience to shake my hand and offer sincere praise. It's always humbling to be reminded that people out there are actually reading this dreck. Those people are the reasons I keep writing. It may have gotten a bit slow around here as of late, but that's about to change.

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