The casual vampire costume-wearer has two choices when it comes to store-bought novelty vampire fangs. Option one: crafted appliances that mold to your teeth and look awesome poking over the edges of your lips. They make you sound a little funny when you talk, are never really comfortable, and are invariably stolen by some house-guest the following spring.

By the night of the next Halloween party, you’re crawling behind the dustiest part of your entertainment center with a flashlight, searching for an object that would have been one tap-water rinse away from going back into your mouth. That’s when you give up, stop at a drugstore on the way out and purchase the classic gum-cutting plastic fangs that cost less than a dollar, would cover your teeth if your mouth was 75 percent smaller, render you completely unintelligible and look only good enough to indicate “Got it, you’re a vampire,” before you take them out and leave them on the table by the booze, not even remotely caring when the host’s cat bats them onto the floor and under the couch.

Now imagine those hunks of plastic attached to a lollypop. You’ve just imagined Moonlight Blood Sucker Candy from Candy Planet: a solid block of plastic gums and upper teeth that are colored either white, platinum or “gold chrome,” with the canines slightly pointed. Extending behind the fangs is a smiling cartoon-faced heart (a Valentine’s Day-style type, not an anatomical approximate) made of hard candy, artificially flavored either strawberry, sour apple or blue raspberry. Put the candy in your mouth and the fangs rest over your front teeth. Now you can’t talk at all and can breathe only through your nose, and if you have to explain yourself in a hurry, you’re going to be spitting out a mouthful of purple saliva first.

Remember Ring-pops, one of those mid-’80s products designed for impulse buys in checkout lines? They were hard-candy pacifiers attached to a plastic ring that you wore on your finger and sucked on, only they were aggravatingly shaped so that you couldn’t close your mouth around them (the candy was an exponentially widening cylinder with a flat top, like Master Control Program in TRON…or Moses in SOUTH PARK), and every time you pulled the ring back out, it effectively soaked your entire hand in syrup-sticky spit. Blood Sucker Candy gave me vivid flashbacks of my quickly abandoned childhood Ring-Pop consumption, except there’s no grip for the ill-shaped lollipop this time; the stick is the teeth. Ever had a Jolly Rancher in your mouth and had to speak, so you tucked it into your cheek with your tongue and, outside of a soft clacking sound, could articulate perfectly? You can’t do that when the candy is fastened to your front teeth.

So does this item look cool? With the fangs firmly in my jaws, I infiltrated a circle of teenage girls and attracted only derisive stares. I blame the teeth.

Moonlight Blood Sucker Candy isn’t for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. It successfully lets you look like a creature of the night while enjoying a constant sweet taste, and effectively keeps you from saying a word. This is a perfect product for children.

Earlier, I mentioned casual vampire costumes and novelty-shop fangs. I know that some of us have $300 custom-made monster teeth that we keep locked in a tiny silver crypt in our home or office, but your kid’s Halloween costume is a different story. Your average CIRQUE DU FREAK fan can barely keep track of which houses he has already hit up for treats, much less the tiniest part of his outfit. Give them Blood Sucker Candy when All Hallow’s Eve next rolls around and they’ll hold onto those fangs for dear life until every ounce of that fruit-flavored heart is dissolved. Horror parents, take note. For all others, I recommend Scarecrow-brand custom-fit fangs, and any candy that’s easier to remove from your mouth.

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