Hanging Heads

From x-entertainment, There comes a time in every man's life when he must toss aside all senses of what's chic and admit that he loves K-Mart.

I do, I really do. Ours is a rundown and gritty number that's stood in its place for as long as I've been alive. It's kind of dusty and musky. The people who shop there are equaled in their rudeness only by the people who work there. They have an old fashioned "Eatery" diner with one of those ICEE machines with the big spinning prop ICEE cups on top, only here, the spinning prop ICEE hits a hiccup during every rotation and makes a sound like that Droid that got massacred in Jabba's dungeon upon each and every turn. The place looks less like a legit store and more like an indie movie set wherein bumbling workerbee teenagers contemplate the banality of life while stocking the shelves with knockoff brand Ruffles chips.

I don't like going to stores that spend oodles of money on image campaigns that make me feel like I'm not good enough to shop there. I need stores that will turn a blind eye if I have a hard cough and really need to spew a loogie on the floor. This is essentially why I love K-Mart, but it's the icing that makes me want to admit it: They're the first big department store in my city that makes the switch to Halloween.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to get fifty e-mails about the awesome Halloween section at Target, only to go there and find nothing but a transitional clearance section full of the summer's Tiki torches, portable fans and beach towels with ironic sayings on them. I may feel at odds with myself when I go to K-Mart and am addressed over the speaker system as a "K-Mart shopper," but they were the first store to make with the ghoulish gravy, and for that, I'm eternally grateful. Or at least a week's worth of grateful. That's when the other stores caught up. And they had better stuff.

Anyway, I found a few choice items on this most recent trip, including a horde of two dollar novelties with flowing black robes and slime-encrusted mouths. I don't need to tell you...those are the best kinds of two dollar novelties.

From K-Mart's "Totally Ghoul" Halloween collection, it's the Hanging Character Heads! If you aren't aware, K-Mart tries to make its Halloween stuff seem less K-Marty by putting big huge "Totally Ghoul" logos on everything, as if it were a separate entity. On the Halloween item quality scale, I'd rate Totally Ghoul junk as a solid 6: Not quite bootleggy and straw marketesque, but it's still a legit possibility that someone would mistake a Totally Ghoul decoration for something a second grader made in art class. That's not a complaint, mind you; feeling cheap and tawdry is part of the collection's charm.

The Hanging Character Heads consist of seemingly dozens of painted plastic monster heads, made to look larger with about fifteen inches worth of cheap robes. Each has a big, stretchy black loop on its head, affording you the opportunity to dangle them from trees or really adequate penises. At $1.99 a piece, they're a steal. The only other Halloween decorations you can buy for that amount are cotton spider webs and bone-shaped candles that drip blood-colored wax when lit, which doesn't make much sense because bones don't bleed.

If there had been only three or four different Hanging Character Heads, I may have passed. The beauty of this collection is that it's absolutely huge. I picked up nine different versions, and there had to be at least ten more. There's no set theme for 'em, either -- you'll find satanic clowns mixed in with typical witches, and the only common thread is that everyone tries to mask the fact that they have no limbs by wearing sleeveless mumus.

These are pretty much no-brainer purchases, but there's one caveat: Certain Hanging Character Heads are far cooler than others, and you must spend the extra minute digging through the loosely organized racks of them to make sure you're not going home with a D-lister when Dracula is right fucking behind him.

Or, you can use my handy guide to nine of the different variations below, and map out your shopping plan before going to K-Mart. Don't have a K-Mart? Don't worry...I've seen these guys in other stores, too. Sometimes, the robes or faces are a little different, but they're pretty consistent otherwise.

Go here for more hilarity, http://www.x-entertainment.com/halloween/2007/september17/