It’s funny, I’ve spend a ton (for me) on candy for this Halloween season, but I’ve yet to talk about any of it yet, so I thought today would be a good day.  The crop of interesting new stuff in the stores right now can hardly be described as a banner year for Halloween candy.  Like most years, 90% of the treats are your basic fun-size output from the major companies, so you won’t have a hard time finding any Snickers or Reese Peanut Butter Cups, and of the remaining 10% most of it is retreads of last years new products.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as happy to see Ghost Dots on the shelves again as finding something new, but it sure doesn’t help me with content for the site.

Anyway, I don’t really have a preferential list of favorites, but I do have a handful of candies that feel like they deserve to be at the bottom of a proposed list, so it’s as good a place to start as any.  Basically this year, some of the candy I was most excited about picking up ended up being some of the worst tasting dreg I’ve ever shoved into my mouth.  Flix Candy is sort of making a name for themselves in the odd/grotesque department with a whole assortment of gummi stye candies, ranging from the mildly amusing (Gummi Popcorn), to the out right nauseating (Zit Poppers gummi pimples.)  I first rand across them a couple Halloween seasons ago with one of their first big entries into the market their Fresh Box of Boogers.  What caught my eye initially was the super detailed mascot character on the packaging and the very odd concept of snot gummis.  Back then I didn’t care for the flavor and consistency of the product (they fell into the category of sugar coated gummis that were on the sour side, not some of my favorite things), and even though they supposedly have been improved in the past two years I haven’t been able to bring myself to picking them up again.  This year I couldn’t help but notice how much the company has grown (in terms of product offerings), so I decided to give them another chance and I picked up 4 varieties including Zit Poppers, Bed Bugs, Freaky Fingers, and a life size gummi Gecko that I didn’t bother to photograph after trying the rest of this stuff (it too was awful.)

Zip Poppers…

These are packaged in a very similar manner to the Boogers from a couple years ago and I was expecting them to be the worst of the bunch.  Inside the box is a bag full of wet, translucent flesh-colored gummies with angry looking red tips that are filled with a bit of liquid candy (they are billed as Ozzy, Sticky, Goo Filled Zit Gummies after all.)  Comparatively these are the best tasting candy I’ve sampled from Flix Candy to date, though they aren’t nearly as good as most common brands of gummi candy and I’m not a fan of the sticky messy factor as it feels like an "eat-the-whole-bag-or-throw-the-remainder-away" kind of candy.  The "zit-popping" aspect was lackluster at best (I’ve had better oozing experiences with Freshen Up gum), though there are quite disgusting to look at…

Bed Bugs …

I was really impressed by the quality of the design on the Bed Bugs candy, as it’s pretty rare to find gummies with this many colors and this much detail in the molded design.  Taste-wise their pretty damn horrible and a bit too tough for my gummi palate.  If there was one saving grace (beyond their interesting appearance) it would have to be that fact that 4 of the 8 included gummis had a camouflaged candy sugar coating that make for a ghastly and realistic (I’m assuming here) bug crunch that really took me aback…

Freaky Fingers…

I’ve come across two large sized gummi severed hands this season which in and of itself is cause for celebration.  For this Flix candy severed hand installment I was really jazzed by the coloring and the detail in the molded design.  This looks like a perfect gummi zombie or decompsed corpse hand, though unfortunately as far as taste and consistency goes, this was horrible.  The candy tastes like it’s laced with a low quality gasoline or petroleum product of some sort, and it was tough as all get out.  Maybe this is the trade-off for such a nice appearance and design, but if that’s the case give me less detail and colors and a better taste and mouth-feel.  This is candy we’re talking about and it shouldn’t be a chore to eat it.

If nothing else, I hope Flix candy keeps plugging away at their formulas and hopefully they can find a nice middle ground between appearance and taste.  They are trying which is something I can’t say about a lot of other companies out there…