Hello! I’ll be at the Traverse City Comedy Festival this weekend! Catch me at one of the fun shows happening through Saturday night if you’re in the area!

Show info is all here.

It’s just a few days away! Still some tickets left, go get ’em and I can’t wait to get to California and thaw out for a week.

Catch me January 2nd at 8pm at Supernatural Brewing in Livonia, Michigan. I’m closing out a very fun lineup. Get your tickets!

Big news: I’m headlining the San Francisco Punch Line for the first time on February 25th. Tickets are available now!

Coming up in the next week or so:

House of Comedy 12/3 at 7:30pm (free to get in, good mix of new folks and experienced comics in a showcase format if you want a fun Tuesday night out)
Supernatural Brewing 12/5 at 8pm (this is sold out, tickets may be available at the door, I’m closing this out)
Black Dog Tavern 12/14 at 7:30pm (this is close to sold out, I’m headlining, fun lineup, be somebody)

The Ghoulish Plot: It’s Halloween and Charlie Brown and his “friends” are eager to celebrate. But Linus believes in a mystical Great Pumpkin that will visit the most sincere pumpkin patch that night, and instead of partaking in tricks and treats he sets up shop in a nearby pumpkin patch, only to be disappointed yet again.

If you grew up in America in the last part of the 20th Century you’ve definitely seen this. I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of the Peanuts strip growing up, but as I got older I began to realize the deep undercurrent of melancholy within the strip, and also how relevant the experience of the characters were to my memories of growing up in a small Midwest town in the 80s/90s. Now I’ve read the bulk of the entire run of the strip and read the biography of the creator, Charles Schulz, and hold it up there with Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side as one of the greats of all time.

The thing that has struck me as I’ve gotten older and rewatch this (and the Christmas special) is the way the story represents that big heaping helping of melancholic disappointment that you start to develop as you get to be an older kid at these big holidays. You hope and believe that somehow it will feel as fun and great as it seems like it’s supposed to, and the event can never quite get to those heights…and you have to learn to adapt and savor it anyway. And then you find the parts that mean the most to you, and ignore the rest. It’s not quite as fun as watching Dagwood hork down another giant sandwich, but goddamn does it resonate as you get older.

And…that’s it for the 2024 Cinema of Spookeries! Thanks to the couple dozen of you who reliably stopped by, I appreciate it.

Happy Halloween!

The Ghoulish Plot: It’s Halloween night in a town in Ohio, and as any Michigan person can tell you, there’s nothing more terrifying than being stuck in Ohio.

On that night, four intersecting stories occur with related characters, most of which falls into the classic Twilight Zone “Nice Try, Asshole” story mode — meaning, somebody thinks they’ve got it all figured out and are going to succeed at something, then another factor comes in to change the story and gives the protagonist a “nice try, asshole!” shock to the system.

This is a fun, fast 90-minute Halloween story with some solid shocks and scares, gruesome but not “Terrifier”-level gruesome and with some pretty great character actors filling up the story – including Brian Cox, whose career will be studied for years as an Emmy-winning HBO prestige series star, first Hannibal Lector, random comedy movie supporting player, and McDonald’s Spokesperson.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: at one point some kids have played a mean prank, and the subject of that prank gets a chance to turn it around pretty brutally. Well played, Trick R Treat.

Spookiness Factor: there are some brutal moments and gore, but after watching horror movies all month this felt pretty middle of the road to me in terms of spookiness.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Hundred Grand bars

The Ghoulish Plot: 40 years ago an escaped mental patient who had brutally killed his sister as a child went on a rampage in a small town, killing a handful of people before being stopped and captured while trying to kill Laurie Strode, played by the always-awesome Jamie Lee Curtis. After the original movie (which is still great), a series of sequels were produced that got weirder and cornier and tried to add more backstory and reasoning behind one of cinema’s great villains, Michael Myers.

This movie skips all that and is intended to be viewed as the direct sequel to the original, and now Laurie is a survivalist who is twice-divorced, partially estranged from her daughter and living in a remote cabin and plotting how to eventually kill Michael Myers if he ever escapes.

Then, one Halloween, you’re never gonna guess what happens – he DOES escape, and proceeds to go on another brutal rampage with an even higher body count.

Seen as a direct sequel, this is a fantastic follow-up to the original movie and delves into the trauma not only of what the original night did to Laurie, but what her reactions did to the people around her. And Michael is just as brutal and unpredictable as you’d expect, with some gruesome kills and not a whiff of explanation. As a character, I’d equate him to the shark in “Jaws” – he kills because that’s his purpose.

The original movie has been in my October rotation forever, and I hadn’t seen this one since it was first released and it still hits like a freight train. Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a great performance (as usual), and the supporting cast (most especially Judy Greer) all fill the rest of the plot with people you actually care about and don’t want to see murdered by Michael Myers.

The Scariest Part of the Movie: at one point Michael Myers enters into a restroom and somebody is trying to hide in a stall…so Myers puts his hand over the door and drops the teeth from his last victim onto the floor. Holy fuck, dude. I get scared enough when somebody tries to open the dumb stall and I’m in there.

Spookiness Factor: the direction and lighting make it possible that you never know where Michael is coming from; at this point we all mostly know how these things work but this one is done at the highest possible skill level. And it was directed by the same guy who did “Pineapple Express;” as though to prove getting super baked and watching horror movies isn’t stupid.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Full Size Twix