Countdown to Halloween - 6 - Poundworld Plus's Scream Machine!

The week before last all the high-street retailers sort of ratcheted-up their offerings for Halloween (clearly a short season) and the rest of the Countdown posts will go through what I dredged-up over last week and the week before.

These were found in Poundworld Plus who now have a tenuous connection to Poundland (I can't remember what it is as I didn't take notes, but it involved take-over talks or something), there are also Poundworld's but in Poundworld Plus, some things cost more than a pound (another parallel with Poundland following the 99p Stores takeover!)

Scream Machine by Davies Products, there's little to scream-about and no mechanicals! As with the earlier set from Poundland; the skeletons went straight to recycling!

Basic semi-flat insects detailed on one side only; we have centipedes, spiders, flies and cockroaches in a cheap tinny polyethylene, the centipedes in oxide-red, the roaches in black the others in black or white.

The spider tool clearly has several cavities as they are different sizes and have slightly different leg poses; I kept about six and the rest will go to charity.

All the roaches have the full Greenbrier/DFSC consumer information panel we've seen printed on the header cards of US/Canadian stuff from Brian Berke, but incised into the mould-tool, so they (Greenbrier/DFSC) are somewhere in the mix here with Scream Machine and DP brand-marks and Davies Products a third/forth party importer.

We will be looking at similar insects for the rest of the countdown, but they all differ, and this is the Fly's comparison, it's hard to choose which is the original and which the clones, I suspect all three are copies of an older donor. Poundworld's has been re-cut with geometric panels, and Sainsbury's looks like it might be a copy of Asda's, but all three differ too much for pantographing, so will be from elsewhere and else-someone and there will be others!