Holy shit, I have been doing a round up of Bad Costumes for 9 whole years now!!!! It’s one of my favorite Gloomthzine traditions and it seems like the costume manufacturers never stop making heinous trash for me to mock here. The premise is I find a bunch of really unfortunate costumes online and then we laugh at them, that’s it.

If you need eight more years of this here are the links:

Year Eight

Year Seven

Year Six

Year Five

Year Four

Year Three

Year Two

Year One

Onto the Bad Costumes!!!!!!!!!!

Sloth From Hell. Is the internet still pinning it’s collective obsession onto sloths this week? Feels a little 2010 to me. However this  inflatable monstrosity is really special. It’s benign neutral bank-teller smile really only makes the giant blow-up claws seem even more menacing. What’s the pocket on the side for? Probably to keep the last scrap of rainforest left un-burned in (too soon?).

People Are Gonna Hit You. If you show up to any moderately sized party in this awkward pinata costume people are inevitably gonna whack you with things. Maybe you’re into that? But you can pretty much guarantee that’ll be the outcome of this costume. You’d better eat a lot of candy ahead of time so at least something will “spill” out when they hit you hard enough.

 

Lamentable Furry. One lone turkey at the furry-meet-up sits at a table wishing he had cut a mouth hole in his rubber mask so he could at least drink…. Wait? If something is technically feathered is it still a furry? I’m concerned about the targeted ads I’ll get if I google that. Furry jokes aside (you do you folks) this costume is fucking terrifying, there’s something so wrong about a faux fur turkey suit.

 

 

The website I nabbed this from simply wrote “This is the Happy Cactus costume” as a description for this. How many male costumes are just dick punchlines? (Answer: Most). Salutum Erectorium it says. Boner. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha into oblivion.

Pandering To Audience Complaints Ponchos. The default for mass manufacturers of costumes for women seems to be “skimpy club outfit with whatever theme stapled to it”. I’m sure they heard the market mocking this for the past 15 years and at some 4pm Friday meeting decided PONCHOS were the answer. What’s the opposite of “sexy”? A BAG you can wear over 80% of your body!!! There were about fifty of these cheap looking costume ponchos available, all with some vague gesture at a Halloween theme- pumpkin poncho, ghost poncho, guilt poncho etc. Yes, we get it, you heard us, but your half assed response clearly demonstrates your feelings on the matter….

 

More Racist Bullshit.  They must have a warehouse somewhere full of bad “sexy” indigenous peoples’ costumes, “China-girls”, and variations of “sexified” Latin cultures because these sites just keep dragging them back out every year. Either some folks are just stupid and racist enough to think this shit is okay, or they are desperate to sell off old stock. Might I suggest these manufacturers burn these shameful costumes and use the energy that generates to power their web servers?

TRY AGAIN. This is not a costume, this is a pitiful bodysuit with “boo” on it. It’s barely anything. It’s not even a boob joke. It’s a costume consolation prize.

Real Wonky Popular Science Fiction Franchise Thing. This awful thing is actually licensed by the money-starved Star Wars franchise, go figure. I can’t stop staring into it’s very sad eyes. I can feel it’s pain.

I Think It’s a Fork? This is not very well thought out or even recognizable. From a distance it looks like a melted spoon or maybe a sperm? They didn’t even separate the tongs of the fork. I like that the model is just wearing his street clothes underneath the “fork” costume, it matches the effort put into designing this costume.

Taxidermist’s Floor. AKA “What do we do with all this leftover stained brown fur?”. It’s titled “Women’s Sexy Space Creature” costume but I’m not sure what teddy fur leg-warmers and balls on your head have to do with space, but sure. At least in space no one can hear you scratch at the rash that cheap fur is gonna give you!

Real Delightful Shark. Every time I see this photo I laugh, it’s just such a bad sloppy shark costume but somehow it’s even more perfect for that. We love you chubby shark!

Fucked Up Tree. This is genuinely scary. It’s gaping mouth and weirdly huge nose. This is going to be so awkward to wear in public, I can just imagine finding it abandoned at 7am November 1st inextricably wound around the turnstile poles of a subway station, a shapeless brown heap. It also doesn’t look like a tree.

Have you seen any really bad costume ideas yet????

Happy Almost Halloween!

-Taeden