This weekend was a busy week, so I give you what I did on Saturday. As you’ve probably deduced, I live in the Sacramento area where there seems to be many small conventions. I attended the Sacramento Horror/Sci-Fi Convention for the first time yesterday… It was worth a short review.
The Sac Horror/Sci-Fi show is small. It’s smaller than SacAnime and I’ll say confidently that the crowd size was laughable; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, it offered a homey atmosphere and made it possible to meet people and keep in touch with them throughout the convention. It also offered more space to move around without having to worry about trampling on another person. I would consider that a huge plus. The seating is limited, the panel room and film room are the best places to find a seat that isn’t on the floor. All-in-all, the actual space and comfort of the event was excellent.
The attendees and con-goers were not bad people, most of them were (obviously) nerdy as all hell and that was awesome. There were all sorts of Star Wars shirts along with Star Trek and about a million shirts based on cheap horror movies. The costumed group was limited and many of them were just teenagers slathering on cheap makeup and slashing their shirts to look like zombies. There were a few costumes that had more to offer but it was fairly limited in that aspect. The crowd was friendly and open to people who DID dress up, so it was fine experience.
The “special guests” were excellent and I must say they did an fine job in finding some good people to come. They had Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian), Derek Mears (Jason and Predator), C. Andrew Nelson (Darth Vader), Ed Gale (Chucky) and a few others I personally didn’t recognize but were non-the-less important to others. The lines were fairly short and the guests very civil, I actually had a fairly lively conversation with Derek Mears.
The movie selection in the movie room was awful. I really must say that what I did see was not very good. There were two decent shorts but then things became strange when one of those movies started turning into some strange sort of pornography that centered on masochism and many strange fetishes. I took my leave then, a little sad since it took a fair amount of work to get into the room (nobody under 18 may enter without an adult guardian) but feeling like it was fairly ridiculous. If I wanted some hardcore, fetish pornography I’m sure I could find better things on the internet. I would say that the films were overall awful, unless you like that sort of thing… fake blood and bad acting.
The final event of the day was my favorite. It was the Zombie Ball. The ball was just a few bands playing for us to all enjoy. The first band lacked a vocalist and played strange music that felt a little too upbeat and cheery. The second group was good, but all fairly young. The third group was awesome, they were a sort of metal with very gothic lyrics; we had a lot of fun jumping, head banging and even moshing a little, as small as the crowd was we found a way to pull it off…. There was a short contest for the “best zombie costume” and then the night ended around at least
I would say the con is worthy of 3/5 stars. I won’t go into details about what I did but I can post a few pictures later, and you’re always welcome to ask… That’s the Sacramento Horror/Sci-Fi Con in a nutshell, and a nice story about a Saturday night.
