Daddy's Little HELLper

Someone sent me this photo from a big rummage sale they attended -- not strictly thrift store, but definitely terrifying.

Someone put a lot of work into this doll! Per the tag on its foot, it has human hair and eyelashes, is artist-signed, and is called "Daddy's Little He(lper)" (I couldn't read the whole last word, but I'm assuming). But why did they give it (in the words of one commenter) the smile of Jack Nicholson? (She also said he was missing his axe, which explains the outstretched hand.)

I will devour your soul.

Of course, I was punished for my opinion, because someone else looked at the photo and said it resembled me as a child.

Worse yet, I can kind of see her point.

Which, now that I consider it, raises some serious doubts... about my... personality... heh heh... Where did I leave my axe again?

Highlander II: The Thriftening

Usually when I feature something on Thrifty Terrors, it's an item so mind-blowingly weird, scary, poorly made, in awful taste, or just unimaginably bad that I feel no qualms about laughing at it.

Which is why when I found THIS treasure at Goodwill, I knew it had to go on the blog, if only as an honorable mention:

Highlander II: The Film Disavowed By Everyone Ever Involved In Highlander.

If you're not familiar with Highlander II: The Quickening, you should know that it's considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made.  (Don't believe me? Watch The Spoony Experiment's review.)  It's so bad that the rest of the Highlander films -- which, in spite of their cult action-movie status, are not exactly the highest form of cinematic art -- booted it out of canon and refuse to acknowledge its existence in the series storyline.  The movie's producers even re-edited the film and re-released it to remove all the [SPOILER] references to space aliens and flying stardust people, calling the new edit "The Renegade Cut."

But this is not that version.  This is the original film, in all its terrible post-apocalyptic, plot-holed, planet-full-of-inconsistently-immortal-aliens glory.  And it was still in plastic wrap, with K-mart discount stickers all over it.  How could I do anything BUT invest 99 cents in this... er... classic?

So I picked up the movie, thinking I had hit the bottom of the barrel for that particular store.  But that was before I discovered a whole cache of Christopher Lambert movies.

Nooooooooooooooo!

The postscript to this story is strangely appropriate:  Even though Highlander II was "new" in retail shrink wrap, when I finally opened it to show it to a group of friends, it turned out to be a used copy re-sealed in plastic. The previous viewer had stopped in the middle, and didn't even bother to rewind it.

(I can't really say I blame them.)

Free Ashtrays, Anyone?

This isn't really a terror -- more of a head-scratcher.  It gets an honorable mention for being thrift-store related, though.

When I was in high school, my friends and I used to eat at fine dining establishments like Dairy Queen because we didn't have much money and we liked sugar.  This was back in the days when smoking was still allowed in public restaurants in our city, and Dairy Queen had these sweet* little disposable foil ashtrays with stars on them. I have always hated cigarettes, but my friends and I sometimes picked up the clean ashtrays and made crafts out of them because... well, they were shiny, they were easily folded, and they had stars on them. They were also free, and we were broke high school students.  We had to get our kicks somewhere.

Fast forward XX years.  Smoking has been prohibited in restaurants for nearly seven years in this county, and I hadn't seen those disposable ashtrays anywhere for years before that.

Until this week:

The stuff of my teenage craft projects. I still have one that used to hang on my bedroom wall.

Apparently someone stole a stack of disposable ashtrays from a Dairy Queen, hoarded them for more than a decade, and then decided to donate them to Goodwill.

The best part? Goodwill priced these (formerly) free, disposable items at a magnanimous 49 cents each.  "Yep, ladies and gents, for only 49 cents, you can own your very own free disposable ashtray!  Join us next week, when we'll be selling plastic drink lids and paper napkins for the bargain price of 29 cents!"


* I use this term in the '90s slang sense meaning "awesome," not the more common usage meaning "adorable or cute."

2-pack: Counting Is Hard

No, that's not the latest single from an undead rapper.

This is technically not a Thrifty Terror, since it's in a retail store and not a true thrift or secondhand shop -- but it's a dollar store, so we'll give it an honorable mention.

I was walking through the baby supplies aisle, and noticed that everything this particular company sells comes in a 2-pack, labeled as such in the upper right-hand corner.  As advertised, many of the packages did, indeed, come with two items:  Two plates; two bowls with lids; two bottles; twelve spoons...

Wait -- twelve?

Counting is hard.

Yep.  Guess it's too much work to ask the graphic designer to stick a 1 in front of the 2 on the product card.  *facepalm*