Owen Egerton's Annual Halloween Bash

Opting out of observing downtown debauchery and drunkenness, I decided to hit up the S. Lamar Alamo Drafthouse for "Owen Egerton's 4th Annual Halloween 4 Bash." I figured
1)If Egerton has anything to do with this showing, it will be hilarious. (As an improvisational comedian, writer, and fixture at the Alamo Drafthouse, Egerton makes his living making people laugh.)
2) The costume contest and free candy promised to provide my Halloween fix. 
3) There's nothing better than watching a laughably bad movie and being able to make fun of it while you watch it---hopefully while you are half-drunk.

I was delighted to see a line of people waiting outside the theater dressed to the nines in store bought and homemade designs. It made me feel less weird for looking like Stevie Nicks in a black wispy number I scored from the clearance rack at the Megaplexxx. It was supposed to be a sexy witch costume, but in reality was the only halfway modest costume I could find in the store.

Standing in front of us were a well-dressed matador and his bull, a girl with two grand papier mache horns arched around her face, draped with ivory beads and small flowers. Behind us I spied an alien with plastic toxic green hair and huge, shiny gold sunglasses and down the line I saw spitting images of the Republican presidential candidates. I evaluated my crew: a panda, a leather daddy, and a cowboy. We weren't winning any contests that night.

We filed into the theater and took our seats. As the Alamo Drafthouse website had mentioned, there was indeed a "live stalker" in our midst. A putty-faced Michael Myers meandered around, glinting the light of a huge silver kitchen knife on the faces of innocent onlookers. Egerton, dressed in a little kid's polka-dotted clown costume (probably creepier than the movie itself) pelted the audience with Tootsie rolls before running to the front to introduce the movie. Egerton likes the movie. He revealed the strange, illogical timeline that has Michael Myers returning from the dead, time and time again persevering through full-body explosions and barrages of bullets. Halloween 4 was different though, he claimed. It was better than you expected.

This statement proved to false. And it was a tragedy that Egerton didn't indulge us with much more than his own perspective of the movie remarking that it was a social commentary while still being completely ridiculous. My attention wandered thanks to the predictable screenwriting and I still only have a shady understanding of the movie. We walked out of the film feeling unfulfilled except for the buttery popcorn that lined our bellies.

Things could have turned around. Live Oak Brewery was sponsoring the event, and so there was a free keg of cold, tasty beer awaiting the Halloween 4 Bashers at Sinsations, an adult boutique off of S. 1st Street. Apparently, the plan was to drink free beer while surrounded by rubber sex toys and swings. Besides what I could see on the movie covers, not much action was going on and the place emptied quickly. Perhaps if Egerton had led us in a game of Dildo Ring Toss (which was set up on a table in a enticing multi-colored spectacle), or offered another source of diversion, the party could have carried on. Instead, after enjoying a free beer, we left with the disconcerting familiarity of every single rubber whatsit that was hanging on the bare walls.