Halloween Magic at Boney Island

You may recall my post about the return of Boney Island, one of the most beloved home haunts of all time. Friday night saw the debut of Boney Island's new theme of skeleton magicians performing tricks. The show was a great success with a large turnout, including the press. You would never guess that the plan to put on a new show was hatched only this summer, and that many of the items to build this show were obtained in only the past month or two.

Here's creator Rick Polizzi:

 He made posters to highlight each magic act being performed. This poster is for the main event, a water show:
The 10 magic cauldrons shot green glowing water 12 feet into the air, eliciting applause:

The popular fortune teller answered questions and amused the crowd:

Neighbor David, on the right, is the secret voice of the fortune teller

The crowd usually gets deep for the fortune teller

A magician passed a hoop around a levitating skeleton:

Another skeleton levitated a bit too much and other skeletons climbed into a tree to chase him down:

One skeleton held a flashlight while another talented skeleton made shadow puppets with his boney hands, including a bird, a witch, a castle- even the Boney Island skull logo!:

A team of blind-folded knife-throwers aimed at a target:

Of course, to make things more difficult for the knife-throwers, the target had a skeleton in front of it:

Another favorite effect that returned was the spinning web gobo:

Like Houdini, The Man In The Can was a skeleton bound in a strait jacket, and wiggled to escape it while under water in this creepy confine:

Another skeleton magician sawed other skeletons in half...but he made a few errors:

In a window, one skeleton lures a skeleton rabbit out of a top hat by waving his magic wand, and another skeleton assists by bribing with carrots:

The collection of super-sized jack o' lanterns is stunning in itself, but these pumpkins sing to the music by flashing the lights inside them:

Oh yes, the pumpkins are in that crazy 3-story tall treehouse.

That's some - but certainly not all- of Boney Island. The crew did a fantastic job with the new display, and though the carnival theme is gone, I'm glad to report the old Boney Island magic is back.

Pictures of scared people at a haunted house

What kind of victim are you? Do you grab the nearest shirt (as I do), do you cry, crouch, jump into someone's arms, or just hide your head?

 all photos by Nightmares Fear Factory on Flickr.

Click here to see a set of photos of the hilariously frightened victims at the Nightmares Fear Factory Halloween haunted house in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

The Mourners

This French Pleurant (Weeper) resin statue at Design Toscano reminds me of another exhibit we saw at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art. It was called The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy.



Forty small mourner sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless, second duke of Burgundy, were on display,  in different poses conveying mourning or consoling other mourners, but all dressed similarly. These pieces have been on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France for almost 200 years, but are now on tour because that museum is being rennovated.

 Most are faceless, and rather eerie. I can imagine full-sized versions of these in a yard on Halloween.

John the Fearless's tomb, including these mourner figures, was completed following his death under the supervision of his son, Philip the Good.
If I were born in that time, I know my name would end with "the Weird."

The walls of the room holding the exhibit told the story.

One wall explained that funerals of that time "were lavish events that included black drapes and canopies, a golden drapery over the coffin, presentation of the insignia of the deceased duke’s power (his banners, weapons, and horses), and candles and music in abundance. Hooded black cloaks were distributed to all the participating laypersons, from the members of the duke’s family on down to pages and grooms, while the members of the secular and regular clergy wore the garments of their station. The carriages and horses were also draped in black....

...Class distinctions, normally expressed through dress, became temporarily suspended, the black of mourning reminding all present that death was an experience shared by everyone. "

These carved figures are obviously all in white, but that's probably because black marble was hard to obtain.

When the property where the tomb was located was sold off as national property in 1792, "the tombs were kept for the nation because of their historical value. The mourners had always been perceived as the tomb’s key attraction, and they were felt to possess a 'correctness' of style and modeling rare for the Gothic period." So forget the dead body- the mourners are the key attraction. That's a bit sad.

For more information on The Mourners, click here. 

In another building of the museum, we found sculptures that were FAR less intriguing, other than causing us to wonder how they could have possibly have been deemed credible enough to warrant being placed inside a museum. For example, there was the giant litter box full of clean kitty litter: 

Now that is some crappy art. It reminds me of this cartoon:

Then there was this ingenious painting, shown on the wall with its title card:

This 24x18 inch wonder is by Robert Therrien.
No Title (Blue Oval), 1994
Screenprint on spiral-bound acid-free paper and mixed mediums.

I researched it. The artists says: “Blue oval; all is a mirror, a female apogee, my mother.  Because of the edges, which recede toward the wall and create a shadow, from a distance it seems to float, and because of the paint, it seems solid or hollow.  This shows one aspect of the figure-ground play I’m looking for.”

Really? It just reminds me of a blue dot. And an episode of  the 1980's TV show  "Bosom Buddies" where Tom Hanks's character, Kip Wilson, sees a painting of a red dot that is highly regarded by art critics, and disgustedly exclaims  "It's the flag of Japan!"

 Someone is even selling a t-shirt with those immortal words:

The shirt designer and I are probably the only two people on earth that remember that episode :)

This thin glass case looked like there should be a poster in it. There's even a pushpin laying in the case. It looks like the cases in the halls of my old high school. But guess what? It's art. The museum's docent told me it was a work of "deconstructionism."

At least there was this cool, interactive, large piece of art outside:

during the day the noodles gain energy, and they glow in the dark at night.

And as everybody knows, if it glows in the dark, it's good art!

Cauldron Punchbowl

I really like it when my holiday decorations are also practical objects, like this tabletop cauldron from Victorian Trading Company.

It's 11" and made of ceramic. They refer to it as a punchbowl with ladle, but I think I'll use mine to serve mashed potatoes or chili. I might even add a wire handle to mine using some #9 wire from the hardware store.  The total cost for this cauldron with ladle and lid, including shipping, was $46.90. To get yours, click here. To see thumbnail-sized photos of all 349 Victorian Trading Company Halloween offerings, click here.

Boney Island Returns!

 This is Rick:



This is Rick's Emmy award:


Rick got the Emmy for being a producer on The Simpsons:

But for 10 years, at Halloween, Rick was also the creator of Boney Island, an amusement park filled with over 100(!) plastic skeletons doing silly things in his front yard, like batting at bats in a batting cage:

Or getting their caricatures drawn by another skeleton (of course, every skull looks exactly like the next one):

Or getting duped into being shot out of a cannon, and being called The Once-Human Cannonball:



Or even playing Whack-a-Mole, only here there were witches and vampires popping up, so it was called Whack-a-Ghoul:


Did I mention that is is all animated and each scene had it's own amusing soundtrack to support it? You may have seen some of this on HGTV's "Extreme Halloween" special a few years ago. Or maybe you've seen it on HGTV's "What's Up With That Haunted House?" The 7-piece skeleton band is pretty memorable:



And the hot-air balloon that traversed across the roof:

 There was even a Ferris Wheel, and a spinning ride, appropriately called Whirl and Hurl, that had skeletons riding in cauldrons around a witch. And in the background, a tree house, two stories tall:

The two-story tall treehouse is there year-round.

There was so much more, too. You didn't just view this amusement park from the sidewalk, either. You would wander among the attractions and and hear all of the amusing soundtracks. Some of it was interactive: you could play Simon Says with a talking skeleton, get your fortune told by another skeleton, and jump into a large, spinning, spider web that was projected on the ground.  The yard would fill up with hundreds of people to the point where it would appear that there was an actual carnival taking place. One year, over the 2 weeks prior to Halloween, over 13,000 people came to see Boney Island. It was good, clean, old-fashioned, family-friendly Halloween FUN.

Did you notice I was using the past-tense?
 That's because after 10 years, Boney Island was shut down in 2007 to satisfy some neighbors across the street. Everything in Boney Island was auctioned on eBay. Boney Island vanished.

But now, four years later, those neighbors have moved. Rick had an idea for a new Boney Island, one that would use magic as the theme. And so now with less than 2 months to plan and execute, Rick is working hard to bring Boney Island back, starting from scratch. If all goes well, there will be 3 flying carpets circling up on the roof, one of which will be a toilet bowl rug- because everything is done with humor worthy of The Simpsons. There will be magician skeletons sawing other skeletons in half, and a magician skeleton pulling something out of a hat- perhaps a rabbit skeleton? There will be a skeleton casting amazing hand-shadows on the wall, and there will be tall jets of glowing green water bursting from cauldrons. But first, the cauldrons have to be procured, and the right size has not been located yet.

Rick is a member of our haunt club. After making arrangements, I paid a visit to Rick's house to donate some skeletons, and I saw the FCG rigs used to animate the scenes were laid out to be spray-painted: 


Rick graciously gave me a tour of his beautiful home, where shadows cause a heart to form on the bathroom wall:

And I loved the recently renovated yard, with 3 water features including the pool with water falling all along the edge of the retaining wall:

and this diamond-patterned trellis of star jasmine:

But my favorite room was the game room, with seemingly every toy and game from my childhood displayed on custom shelving:







I asked if he had one of my favorite toys, the Mattel Thingmaker Fright Factory, which had little metal molds of skeletons in which you poured liquid Goop. After heating and setting, you had your own rubbery skeleton. I used to hang mine from straws and make them dance, marionette-style. 
He did indeed have a bunch of Thingmakers, including the Fright Factory:

Rick's game room is no museum- the toys and games get get use. I was so happy when Rick gave me a skeleton they had made with the Fright Factory a while ago, I hadn't seen one in eons!

By the way, Rick recently chased and tackled a car thief! He also told of one the home's original occupants stopping by. The man said the house used to be the only one on the block, but there was no block of tract homes then- it was surrounded by orange groves. The man, who had no knowledge of Boney Island, knocked Rick's socks off when out of no where he told how they use to love to decorate the house extensively for Halloween! It seems the house was destined to always be a Halloween house.
 
These days, just standing and talking with Rick's family and a neighbor on the front lawn causes more than one car to stop and the occupants to lean out and ask "Is Boney Island coming back?"
This year, happily, the answer is Yes, Boney Island is returning! 


To see what the fuss is about, watch a video: