Scotch McTiernan’s Halloween Party // Review
What is the world coming to when honest, hard-working monsters can’t scare the general public anymore? It’s getting to the point where October 31st has lost all meaning. Who can save All Hallows’ Eve in a world of year-round horrors? Writers Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn have fun with the premise in Scotch McTiernan’s Halloween Party. Joining in the fun are artist Scott Koblish and the color work of Hi-Fi. The giant one-shot is a messy scattering of Halloween spoofery that narrowly manages to miss making any real point. It’s big, empty fun with easy, largely lazy jokes on pop culture icons that have been around for a very, very long time.
A horror clown rolls into town to try to terrorize the citizens, but he will have a hell of a time doing so when a mass shooter opens up on a crowd of innocent people. He may not be able to have a whole lot of fun victimizing people, but he’s got a party to go to. There he can commiserate with a bunch of monsters who can no longer live up to the horrors of life in the modern world with its pandemics and its corporate-sized terror from the pharmaceutical industry. In walks mesomorphic monster friend Scotch McTiernan to cheer everyone up with tales from the biggest monster in any movie: the Hollywood action hero.
Duggan and Posehn cartwheel through the world of pop culture horror with no particular attempt at total coherence. The idea is to run a screwball comedy through knockoffs of everything from E.T. to Freddy Krueger to Jason Voorhees to...well...there really is a hell of a lot rolling from panel to panel, but none of it in enough depth to really resonate. The wild, rapid-fire comedy never manages to develop much of a rhythm. When the jokes don’t feel flat, they end up feeling dated.
Koblish wheels through the action and gore with sharp visual wit. McTiernan makes for a respectable exaggeration of the action hero. The monsters all look like they could manage some form of menace if they got in the right mood for it. Koblish manages a fun “monsters after hours” look to the one-shot that might be a lot more impressive if there was some contrast somewhere in the book where they looked genuinely terrifying. With the script playing out the way it does, though, it’s really just a lot of rubbery goofiness.
Duggan and Posehn end the issue with some suggestion of a follow-up for the holidays, which could be fun if the two writers managed to get the right kind of edge for it. With Halloween Party, the writers have nearly found something that could be interesting and genuinely fun. The current issue could have worked so much better. They would have needed to find the right hook to make all of the weirdness feel like it had some point to it.
