It's been more than a year since The A.V. Club last ventured into our local dollar stores in search of foods that strike us as grotesque, profane, and appealingly inexpensive. But with Halloween around the corner, we realized that penurious homeowners everywhere must be wondering how to avoid tricks while not spending too much on treats. Below are some of the cheapest (and most horrifying, in various ways) candies we could find, all ready for unsuspecting and soon-to-be-traumatized neighborhood kids.
Pumpkin Decoder With Pumpkin Candies
The mystery factor makes the Pumpkin Decoder jump off the shelf: What the hell is there about a pumpkin that might need decoding? Turns out it's just sort of a twisty puzzle in which you line up the pumpkin face to reveal a treat. The packaging doesn't really grasp the concept of secrecy, though: It says, "Pull top of pumpkin head. Surprise! Pumpkin candies inside." Thanks for spoiling the surprise, candy-making asshole.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Modified potato starch."
Worth the price: No. The fun is lost immediately, and the no-surprise pumpkin candies are the equivalent of Runts, just pumpkin-shaped, not flavored. On the plus side, stoners could hide Halloween "treats" in here.
MilkMaid Caramel Apple Candy Corn
America, what is your obsession with combining flavors? Have you no patience, or even a need for simplicity? Candy corn is supposed to taste and feel like candy corn, that non-specific, extremely specific flavor that comes just once a year. Brachs, which may have gotten bored at the top of the candy-corn game, has introduced caramel-apple-flavored candy corn, which adds a new non-taste to the canon. It's strange, and just not right. And not very good. And super-sweet.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Made with real milk."
Worth the price: Well, it's cheap, so maybe just for the experience. It tastes like nothing else—not candy corn, not caramel apples, not real apples, not A-1 sauce. Non-specific, buttery, and strange.
Spinning Pumpkin/Grim Reaper Toy/Candy Combo
These two time-killing contraptions contain a handful of ghost- and pumpkin-shaped candies beneath a plastic head with a face that spins when a button on the head is pressed. The device and candy are both nameless, though the former is a lot like what a slot machine would be like if the same thing came up every time you pulled the arm. The latter… well, the latter tastes like wax.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Vegetable wax."
Worth the price? When your kids won't stop jabbering at you for one goddamn minute, anything that will shut 'em up is worth a dollar.
Critter Goo
Fact: kids of a certain age are drawn to gross stuff. Fact: kids of about the same age will eat anything sweet, no matter how cheap and crappy. Put those facts together and you have the perfect excuse for products like "Critter Goo," a line of palm-sized, highly detailed plastic bugs full of sugary slime. Just rip the bug's head off and suck out the innards, which come in four varieties. Who knew flies have grape-flavored guts, ants taste like green apples, tarantulas are strawberry-flavored, and rhinoceros beetles have lemony innards? More to the point, who knew that a candy manufacturer was willing to put this much work into detailing the tiny veins on a fly's wings, the hairs on a spider's abdomen, or the little forks at the end of an ant's legs, all in order to better sell some creamy goop that looks like hair conditioner and tastes like Kool-Aid made with 20 times the recommended amount of powder mix? (That same odd precision went into determining the nutritional value; the packaging proclaims that each plastic insect contains precisely 60.8 calories worth of ick.)
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Sodium citrate."
Worth the price? Once the slime is gone, these become reasonably well-executed toys. Of course, if you don't properly suck out all the guts, these bugs might start attracting their smaller, living cousins. Just make sure your kids understand that slurping the insides out of that second wave of insects isn't a great idea.
Make Your Own Gummy Pizza
The rush to find ever more exciting and innovative presentation forms for the gummi medium is clearly reaching new levels of ambition with the "make your own" series, which invites gourmet gummi consumers to choose the form of their destruction by placing various candies on a gummi base. This all-candy Lunchables kit includes a supposed gummi "crust" that looks more like a spongy marshmallow surface; reckless consumers are supposed to pile it high with liquid-candy "sauce," powdered-candy "cheese," and sugar-crystaled gummi "toppings" before eating it. (No, The A.V. Club will not stop saying "gummi" so much.) While it's sort of impressive to see a single product hit the entire trifecta of modern-candy trends—powdered, liquid, and gummi—that doesn't change the fact that pizza sauce shouldn't be strawberry-pink and translucent, or that this product can rot kids' teeth right out of their heads from 15 feet away.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Agar-agar."
Worth the price? The old saw about how even bad pizza and bad sex are still pretty good has clearly just been proven wrong.
Mr. Yummy Skeleton Pops
Inside a nearly impossible-to-open coffin-shaped bag—hint: have your car keys at the ready for jabbing and ripping—rest five smaller bags, each containing a flimsy plastic skeleton with a skull-shaped sucker head. The sucker actually isn't bad—it's Jolly Rancher-like in consistency, if not in flavor—but the skeleton is far more detailed than a sucker-stick needs to be. Whatever anatomist Mr. Yummy hired to get the rib structure just right left him with a candy that sways back and forth, thrown off-balance by a skull five times the weight of the bones supporting it.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: None, but we are urged to check out the website "imagine-global.com," which currently features scary organ music and a skeleton running back and forth behind what looks to be a vampire worm. Pretty scary.
Worth the price? It says right there on the package: "fun candy." Why would you doubt Mr. Yummy?
Ice Breakers Sours Pumpkins
No, that isn't a misprint. This candy is part of the "Ice Breakers Sours" line, and it's shaped like pumpkins, so forget any dreams of a long-awaited new candy flavor: sour pumpkin. Instead, try to think of this as Ice Breakers' attempt at a new family-friendly curse. ("You don't want to clean your room? Well sour pumpkins, missy!") In the meantime, be aware that if you gobble down enough of these extremely acidic orange- and mango-tinged breath-fresheners, your mouth will smell like a mopped-down public restroom. Don't like it? Sour pumpkins, pal.
Scariest-sounding ingredient: "Medium chain triglycerides."
Worth the price? Before deciding, consider what's written in tiny print on the back of the box: "Careful: Sour level may cause irritation to the mouth." Adjust your snacking hopes accordingly.
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