I was going to do another top ten about unintentionally horrifying movies which proved so popular last Halloween, but I realized I would only have to include Good Will Hunting again, so it would be a rip.  So, in this overview of some of the season’s hottest Halloween costumes, along with several enduring classics, Mr. Paul Maul takes a good, hard, stiff look at what your Halloween costume choice reveals about your level of emotional development.

.

LADY GAGA: Your ever-more outrageous acting out is a function of whatever childhood damage led to your narcissistic tendencies.  It is simply a shield to protect you from both your own feelings of inadequacy and the nagging suspicion that you are the product of that one night when Madonna had sex with David Bowie.

.

VAMPIRES INSPIRED BY THE TWILIGHT SERIES: You have a nihilistic outlook on life, seeing our time on this planet as ultimately empty and pointless.  This is stunningly ironic since you seem to wish you were someone who could live forever.

..

.

THE MAD HATTER: A very popular costume this year.  Wearing this says you would like to be seen as a literary person, even though you wouldn’t know Lewis Carroll from Eleanor Roosevelt and had your first exposure to Alice in Wonderland by seeing the version directed by the guy who did the remake of Planet of the Apes.

.

SPIDERMAN: You are haunted by feelings of guilt over something in your life, often something that feels as serious as having decided to spare the life of the a-hole that ended up killing your uncle.  As a result, you walk around with the classic martyr complex, exacerbated by the way you have internalized your anxiety: FYI, continually quoting the phrase, “with great power comes great responsibility”makes you almost as big an a-hole as the guy who killed your uncle.

.

.

HARRY POTTER: You are a Devil worshipper.  Get help.

.

.

MARILYN MONROE: See: Lady Gaga, minus the bit about Madonna and David Bowie.

.

.

ELVIRA: You are a perfectly healthy person who feels no shame in revealing massive amounts of cleavage to other partygoers while maintaining a general air of forbidden gothic horror that makes you even more unattainable and exciting.  Keep up the good work.

.

.

FREDDY KRUEGER: Halloween is your time to hide behind the mask of a man who terrorizes people’s dreams and is hell-bent on bringing about their violent deaths.  The other three hundred sixty-four days of the year are your time to feel exactly the same way about your boss, but instead of being hell-bent on his destruction, you hold in your anger and load up on the Mylanta.

.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN: You see yourself alternately as a tramp who is not worthy of love and a genius who was misunderstood just because of a couple of child brides.  Perhaps much to your chagrin, neither is true.

.

.

JESUS: To cover up your own bitterness about how God couldn’t possibly have created such a horrible world, you want everyone to know how irreverent you can be about organized religion.  Your cynicism becomes severely tested, however, when everybody at the party demands that you forgive or heal them simply by a laying on of hands.  You can’t exactly say no, can you, smart guy?

.

I’m sure many of you have your own inner-self-revealing costumes that didn’t make the list. Feel free to add them to the “other” category in the reader poll below!

(polls)

I cannot get up the gumption to see this Paul Haggis-helmed offering.  However, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it!

“Everything you need to know about how excellent this movie will be is contained in the fact that it is opening on the same weekend as the new Harry Potter!” – Mr. Paul Maul, mrpaulmaul.com

.

See, now, there again, Lionsgate, I’ve got ‘excellent’ in there.  Use it!

Want more One-Line Rave Reviews of unseen films and other movie stuff? Click Here!

In an effort to create a new tourism phenomenon, China is now calling an ancient rocky peak in its Hunan Province “Avatar Hallelujah Mountain.” The government there claims that a location photographer had come to the area in 2008 and that clearly the mystical mountains used in the film were inspired by the rocks formerly known as “Heaven and Earth Pillar.”

But, why rely on paltry old heaven and measly little planet Earth to convey something majestic about nature?  They don’t look nearly as cool in 3-D and last I checked they have not grossed almost 2 billion worldwide.  As a self-help professional, I can only see this kind of thing as a dangerous trend.  Blithely renaming great monuments or natural formations to suit the arbitrary whims of commerce could cause a crisis in individual empow-WOW-erment.   Humanity could lose touch with something elemental in itself and give its inherent potential over to things that represent its lower consciousness.

Here, then, is a list of new, show business influenced monikers for old things.  I only hope it elicits the proper terror.

TOP FIVE NEW NAMES FOR ANCIENT AND/OR HISTORIC PLACES

Old Name: Angkor Wat – The amazing complex of 12^th Century Cambodian Temples

New Name: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider Estates

Old Name: Christ Church College, Oxford – The great university’s enormous constituent college, named after Jesus Christ.

New Name: Casa de Harry Potter

Old Name: Pont Neuf – The oldest standing bridge across the River Seine in Paris, completed in 1672.

New Name: Bourne Identity Chase Scene Corner

Old Name: Monument Valley – Ancient power combines with a breathtaking variety of sandstone buttes in the Colorado plateau.

New Name: Marty McFly’s Old West Back to the Future Part III Basin

Old Name: Palace Square, St. Petersburg – Central square of the former Russian Empire, where the October Revolution took place in 1917.

New Name: GoldenEye Mall

Feel free to supply your own showbiz name for a venerable and majestic place.  As long as you experience an ache inside when you do it.