Countdown to Halloween: Party’s over …

So, I have this friend, Jon.

Jon is one of those guys who is a true aficionado of cheese. Not the kind you would eat, but the kind you would consume through your cassette deck or VCR. If it could be considered obscure or underground, or at least the sort of thing most sane people would recoil from out of fear and confusion, Jon had a line on it. It was pretty amazing considering this was still in the early days of the Internet; he did most of his hunting and gathering through the mail, discovering and ordering his oddities by following photocopied “catalogs” like faded parchment maps.

Best of all, he brought his friends along.

At the time we were all working together at the same newspaper, slogging (and then racing) through our 3-to-midnight shift on the copy desk. Once we actually left the building about an hour later, we’d often stop at some fast food place that was still open, head to Jon’s, and watch whatever bootlegged piece of culture-trash he’d managed to have shipped across state lines.

Basket Case. Meet the Feebles. Winnie the Pooh cartoons set to the Apocalypse Now soundtrack. I saw all of these for the first time at Jon’s apartment, full of Taco Cabana nachos and surrounded by friends (though the nachos might take care of that last part). I have fond memories of those times and of those movies, including this one — 1992’s Dead Alive (originally released as Braindead), a Peter Jackson splatstick film considered by most to be one of the goriest movies ever. Consider yourself warned.

Jon, this one’s for you.