Alas, BEBE 2014, our fifth year, is over!  Five movies, some games and way, way too much food spells “success” to us!

As a handy review let’s see how we did according to the four rules of Boiled Eggs and Brain Eaters:

Watch Some Zombie Movies

Check!  Here’s the final tally:

• Deadheads: Fun and silly, but more fun than silly.
• Zombie Cheerleading Camp: Craptastic!
• Rise of the Zombies: Better than an Asylum movie has any right to be, but still not good.
• Detention of the Dead: Decent, but nothing really special.
• Shaun of the Dead: Perfection. Absolute perfection.

Eat Lots of Good Food

We ate way too much Platter’s Chocolate, many ugly boiled eggs, zombie cookies. Only a few of the zombie eyeballs lasted until today, but they were a huge success.  To offset the sweets we did a nice ham, mashed sweet potatoes and homemade mac’n’cheese. We should be mobile again sometime tomorrow.

Play Some Games

Check! Our new game, Zombies!!!, was a bit too intimidating to try today, but we’re going to set aside some time soon. We did spend time with our favorite pick-up-and-play zombie game, Zombie Dice by Steve Jackson Games. We also tried some ZombiU on the WiiU. We didn’t play long, but it looks promising.

We can also highly recommend playing TellTell Games masterpiece, The Walking Dead, as a family. The game is slow enough to support collaborative play, but exciting and well-written enough to keep the attention of those not holding the controller.

Spend Some Time with Those You Love

Check! This was a great year for us. We enjoyed a truly gorgeous day here in Scranton and were able to sit with open windows and doors while we watched the rampaging dead. A nice breeze makes everything better, doesn’t it? Everybody had a great time and there were no fights or bickering (something of a minor miracle with two teenagers).

We hope that you had a great day with those you love and were able to fit in a little fun and games.  We also hope to see you here in 2015 which will mark the sixth anniversary of Boiled Eggs and Brain Eaters!

More BEBE 2014!  Our fourth movie, “Detention of the Dead“, was hit or miss, but mostly (weak) hit. There were a few truly terrible effects, but also some decent ideas. A solid movie overall and a nice lead-in to dinner and our last movie.

Dinner is Easter ham, mashed sweet potatoes, homemade mac’n’cheese and some vegetables. We ate it sitting in front of the TV like every terrible family you’ve ever seen on TV being terrible by eating in front of the TV. We’re all stuffed close to hibernating bear-level now. We can move, but we choose not to.

As always we end our night with “Shaun of the Dead“. It remains the undisputed king of zombie movies and is one of the few perfect movies ever made.

More BEBE 2014!  We’ve started our fourth movie, “Detention of the Dead“, and so far, so good. Decent production values and a decent set-up. There’s already been a few decent call-outs as well (the sign let’s us know that they’re in the “Savini Library”).

ZombiU on the WiiU ended up being deeper and more thoughtful than we initially gave it credit. There’s an interesting mechanic where, once you become infected and die, you begin nearby as another survivor. You can then go to your last location and put down your previous incarnation and reclaim your equipment. We’re still not sure if the game has staying power, but so far its definitely bringing some new ideas to the table.

We also decided to put our favorite creations together and create the stickiest, sweetest zombie horde that you’ll ever see! It includes the best of our ugly boiled eggs, the most gruesome zombie cookies and even some of those terrible marshmallow zombies that we made. We posed them all and took a few artsy shots.

That one plate is enough to terrify a dozen dentists!

More BEBE 2014!  Our third movie, “Rise of the Zombies“, was much better than our second, but still dumb as hell in that trademarked Asylum Films kind of way. Since it’s time to start working on getting dinner going we’re taking a game break before our next selection, “Detention of the Dead“, kicks off.

My son is trying out ZombiU on the WiiU. So far it looks like a decent survival-horror FPS with some forced integration with the WiiU game pad. It’s hard to tell from only a few minutes: this one could still go in either direction.

We played a ridiculously long round of Zombie Dice by Steve Jackson Games. This is one of our favorite games and an absolute must for any zombie fan. The rules are insanely simple: roll three dice. Keep any brains and shotgun blasts, put any runners back in the can. You can stop at any point and bank your brains, but three shotgun blasts means that your turn is over and you lose any unbanked brains. First person to 13 wins.

It’s fun, quick and easy enough for anybody to play in minutes. Most games take about ten to twenty minutes, but the round we played during the movie lasted over forty. I ended the game with zero points having rolled triple shotgun blasts at least nine times. My lovely bride won: parents rule, children drool!

More BEBE 2014!  Our second movie, “Zombie Cheerleading Camp“, wasn’t… good. In fact it was very not good. There was an hour long (or at least it felt like an hour) fight with a stuffed squirrel.

Our third selection, “Rise of the Zombies“, is a made for TV Asylum production. This usually means “terrible“, but after the last one it’s looking positively Oscar-worthy. It also features the hardest working man in show business, Danny Trejo!

The first “BE” in BEBE is “Boiled Eggs” so we got to work on them!  We first tried some traditional food-coloring and dye but the result were disappointing. We did the old trick where you draw on the egg with crayon, but they still came out just a little too festive. It didn’t help that our lead shorty kept making them look so gosh-darned happy.

So we pulled out the the old Dudley’s Spin an Egg from last year. We didn’t have any of the dye that came with it but undiluted food-coloring seems to work pretty well.  The damn thing is still too hard to spin up and it’s still really hard to get the lid on, but it did the trick. It did stop spinning after a few eggs – the spinner lost its whatzitmajigger – but it actually worked just as well, or better, when spun manually.  In any case we got a nice set of gross-looking eggs.

These have a really long dry-time and look like they’ll remain messy for at least a few hours. We probably should have figured them out earlier.

More BEBE 2014!  We had a lot of fun with our first selection, “Deadheads“. Sure it was a little to “Scooby Doo”, but it was also laugh-out-loud funny in places that it actually wanted to be, and that’s always good news.

Our second selection is “Zombie Cheerleading Camp” and it’s… not looking good so far. The movie started with an extended still-screen, comic-book montage explaining how nazis made zombie squirrels and Americans buried the formula in the woods. Or something. From IMDB:

“Its Brains, B-R-A-I-N-S and pass the pom poms as Horror ensues when a camp full of air headed cheerleaders face a contagious Zombie Virus.”

Wish us luck on this one, folks!

We decided to try something new this year and… it didn’t go all that well. We dyed some marshmallows using the egg spinner and used the cake decorations left over from the cookies to zombie them up. We probably won’t try this again, but if you’d like to learn from our mistakes:

• The dye didn’t work that well. I think it reacted with the sugar and just made everything look brown. Perhaps brushing it on would work better?
• A snip or two with a pair of scissors can make some pretty convincing looking mouths and head wounds.
• We tried using some cereal as eyes (glued on with frosting) and they were… okay. You may want to try something different.
• Food coloring will end up much darker than you might expect.

We could probably improve our technique and eventually come up with something workable. The real problem is that after you spend all that time and effort you just won’t want to eat these. Even the shorties turned their sugar-hungry noses up at them. The dye gives them a terrible texture and an odd taste and they seem to stale almost immediately. We’re probably going to be sticking with cookies from now on.

The baskets were big hits even if they were a little light this year. There was plenty of Platter’s Chocolate; the very best kind of chocolate. It doesn’t matter where we live or how much it costs: Platter’s is worth it. My only complaint is that they haven’t (yet) embraced the zombie movement so we’re forced to deal with cute bunnies, but once you gnaw on them a while they fit in just fine.

My (twelve year old) daughter insisted on finding eggs, so we begrudgingly obliged and hid them. My 15 year old son did not insist on finding his eggs, but since his sister hid them without being asked, he kind of had to.
We raided the zombie aisle and have quite a few things to try out and review. Everybody got a “Keep Calm and Kill Zombies” t-shirt and a collection of zombie rubber ducks. There are a couple of new video games, Dead Island and ZombieU, mostly for the men-folk. Neither were reportedly very good, but they were bargain binners, so who cares? We also got a new tabletop game to try out: Zombies!!!. It’s a long one (over two hours to play) and looks pretty complicated, so we’ll probably save that for another day.

Lots to watch and do and play and eat and eat some more!

We’re kicking off Boiled Eggs and Brain Eaters 2014 (tag: BEBE 2014)!  We got a bit of a late start, but we’re fine with that. One of the benefits of creating your own holiday is that there’s no reason to get up early for it. There’s no rush.

The kids have sullenly raided their baskets and are sitting on the couch like lumps. Teenagers.

We’re starting off the movies with something light: “Deadheads“. Sounds like it could be fun. From IMDB:

“Two inexplicably coherent zombies awake amidst a zombie attack, and decide to take a road trip to find the one’s lost love, unaware they are being chased by the agents of a ruthless company with its own agenda.”

We’ll be posting activities and mini-reviews throughout the day.  As usual, we”ll do full-length reviews of everything in the coming weeks, but for today, posts will be short and pithy so we can get back to the fun.