VIDEO: Halloween Mash UP

^{Halloween at Resurrect, Bloodfeast, and Estate}

At 11:30 pm on Halloween, we realized we never charged our camera. After nearly abandoning the night to a bottle of vodka (sometimes we get a bit dramatic), we had 19 minutes of juice. That’s all a responsible journalist needs, right? Dressed as Luke Skywalker and one of the Lost Boys, we hit the road at midnight: three parties, two hours, little battery, and an ambiguous clock roll-back that hypothetically allowed an extra hour of early-morning extravagance. (Turns out it didn’t, as the bouncers at Estate later explained.)

First stop was Resurrect at Privus, thrown! by our buddies at Throwed!. By midnight, the place had cleared out, but several Quailmen and an assortment of poorly conceived Jokers still made the rounds, flirting with sexy angels (or something, I dunno, they wore white, sparkles, and not much else) and jumping around to the Cool Kids DJ set. Watching the '90s Nickelodeon spillover from Resurrect mix outside with the regulars at the adjoining Kells -- a bar whose patronage necessitates a prominently displayed dress code barring chains, camo clothing, and Timbs -- provided an illuminating context in which to begin our Halloween crawl (and just begged for a hysterical cross-over brawl … er, massacre). And with that, we fled into the night.

Our next stop was a total departure from the tameness of Privus: Bloodfeast at Machine. Bloodfeast was sexy, depraved, fetishy, and just plain cool. Every blast of the strobe revealed a new (sexy) nightmare, every bump of the bass opened a new cavern from which crawled the dregs of hell. Angels in gas masks pole-danced next to strippers in leather pants. A dom and her sub -- chain, leash, and all -- ordered a drink from the bar, while a 40-year-old man wearing a baby-blue baby costume walked around sucking a pacifier, all to the kind of industrial trudge familiar to patrons of Thunderdome (whose resident DJ Mistaker was on deck that night). Bloodfeast sucked us in and almost didn't let go, but alas, necessity dragged us off to the Alley downtown.

At Estate, the ratio of shirtless dudes to things in general was entirely out of whack, but the décor -- that of an upscale, vain-chic movie nightclub -- killed, calling for a clientele cooler than observed. Mummified corpses and the skeletal remains of haute couture swung on chandeliers, while scantily clad hotties danced in cages near the ceiling. Were the Butabi brothers from A Night At the Roxbury (yeah, I dropped that shit) to open another club, it might look something like Estate on Halloween.

Afterward, we sat on the curb with no camera battery and a mission accomplished, waiting for our friend. A fat devil in an unflattering costume poked me in the ass with her trident, then mistook me for Peter Pan. I was holding a lightsaber. And dressed in white. Really? Considering the places we’d been, I couldn’t imagine a more fitting -- or culturally bereft -- end to our night.

--P. Nick Curran and Addison Post