March's First Review for 2013

[marchofprogress]

Review 9/29 and 10/10

Me and my lovely lady went on 9/29 so we could see everything in the daylight, then we went again 10/10 to catch what we missed.

9/29:

Surprisingly packed for a Sunday. I thought we'd cover everything but we didn't. We missed La Llorona, Afterlife and Havock.

I think because of that, the overwhelming feeling we got from the event was that it was very very repetitive and sparse. Let me explain.

I drive past the billboard on I4 every morning that advertises "Walking Dead" "Resident Evil" and "Evil Dead" and when I saw all three of those together the first time I couldn't help but notice that the words are jumbly. Evil Walking Resident Dead Evil. Trees.

But then when I got to the event, that's about how it played out.

Since I wasn't sure we were going to get to do it during the day again, I did what I always like to do when I get there early enough for sunlight: I scouted the whole park as quick as I could and took pictures of cool stuff that wouldn't work during the nighttime.

When we were back at the front of the park, I remembered The Strategy. The Strategy is, of course, my preferred method of avoiding lines - you head alllllll the way to the back.

So we went to The Walking Dead. I'll post house reviews separate... But anyway WD lands outside Llorona, and it said it had a 90 minute wait. No way I was waiting that long. And I figured my plan wasn't working. So, SCRAP.

So we hightailed it across the park, ate turkey legs like cavemen, and stumbled on our next house. Naturally for me this was Cabin in the Woods because I think that movie is amazing and I wanted to see how the heck they made it into a house.

After that we turned around and headed toward Werewolf, which was the next one I wanted to see. A lot of this was planned around how we're probably going to go on the UTH tour and we wanted to see all the houses on the tour in the dark before we see them in the light. Plus we just watched AWiL the day before.

As always seems to happen to me on that front stretch of the park, I ended up all the way in the back without noticing. So we were like "Evil Dead? Wut? How'd that happen?" ..... So we pulled out the trusty map and saw that we had a clear path back.

So we did Evil Dead. Which is a house about .. A ... Cabin ... In the woods. I'm obsessed with Cabin in the Woods but my girl still can't differentiate those two houses in her memory. Just a bunch of cabins and ... dirt.. and.. wood... and ... whatever.....

Next we got to Werewolf and .... It felt like more of the same. Somehow. I don't know. We both loved it anyway.

Finally, we were tired and ready to leave, but Resident Evil's wait time was like 4 seconds, so we did that.

10/10

We went back on Thursday mostly to hit the other three houses we missed. We did.

I wanted to start with Afterlife because I'd read some stuff here and elsewhere with people saying it was the best house of the event, and 3D houses are awesome. Plus My Lady had never been in one (or any other HHN houses before, for that matter)... That was cool.

Then we did La Llorona, saw a human wearing a horse mask, and headed toward Bill and Ted (I am aware that this is a retarded way to work a map). Girls seem to like to take me to Bill and Ted. ....... Anyhow after that we rode the MiB ride, cus I'm four years old and I enjoy it

Finally we did Havoc and left. It sounds like we did a lot less but I took a TON of pix. I think there are 300 in my album I posted, but that's not counting all the deletes and such.

Anyhow.

REVIEWS!

I guess I'll go in order from The Bomb to The .... Dud?

Spoilers abound, I guess, but you already know all this stuff anyway....

1- Afterlife: This was awesome. I like when you can't even give spoilers away in a house because it detracts from nothing at all if you do. I can tell someone who's never been in the house what's in there but ..... You just gotta see it. Don't miss this one. It's cool.

2- Cabin in the Woods: I wanted this to be #1 because I'm a fanboy. But Afterlife was just TOO COOL. And I am upset about the same things other people were upset about - the merman and unicorn. However, I got to see the Ballerina. Of course the beginning of the house was kinda lame (but so was the beginning of the movie. That's the point). Definitely gave me a husband bulge.

3- American Werewolf: First off let me be the first to say I am pissed off there were no scareactors in the first room. I would've loved to ask somebody if I should stay off the moors or not. But kudos for having the hallucination/nightmare creature. And the subway. And .... Werewolves. And omg, the transformation scene. So good. This house was awesome.

4- La Llorona: This house has the "What the butt" factor that puts it square in the middle for me. It had a whole lot of atmosphere. A whole lot. I'm pretty sure that was it. And then there was someone wearing a horse. I guess. If you had no idea what the story was, you'd ... have no idea what the story was. House was cool .. I guesssss... Gotta go through a few more times.

5- Evil Dead: 1- Too much like Cabin in the Woods to do this year, 2- Everybody telling me they're going to eat my soul is lame. However, I think this may just be because we went so early on. I want to see this house again later.

6- Walking Dead: 1- You not only have a scarezone about Walking Dead, you have NO OTHER scarezones, 2- This was done last year, 3- Everything was behind fences. I'd like to go thru this one again to see if maybe they made it ... Anything ... But not if the wait is more than like 10 min (read: I'll go through ten thousand times on Halloween and think it's awesome).

7- Havoc: This was so unmemorable that I .. Don't remember it. We went through it. I know that. I'll probably need to go through again, since the wait time is only 30 seconds long. Possibly because it is .... Not The Bomb.

8- Resident Evil: What the hell was this? People have supposed that this was the 'funny' house of the year, but I disagree. I think it was just disjointed and garbage-a-riffic. There were like 2 scareactors. They were humans, fighting on our side. Also, I died in there WTF!

Street Experience

Grr.

... Oh, need more elaboration? Okay...

This was my girl's first experience at HHN. And I feel like she got robbed. Personally, I like to wander the park and take pictures pretty much more than anything else, and that usually involves hanging out in scarezones taking pictures of sexy half naked chicks rocking out to The Beautiful People.

Instead we got one park-wide (ish) scarezone that was like that damn carnival bs in 2007.

And you know what? Here's The Thing - ONE ZOMBIE... Is not scary!! I can outrun one zombie! And if I can't? I bet my right hook could knock it down so I could. And I'm a big boy - 6', 250ish, so I'm not a fast runner. But I walk to the bathroom faster than a zombie.

Two zombies? Okay, that gets to be a problem.

But zombies are only a real threat when there's TONS OF THEM. You need to feel outnumbered. Having a few straggling zombies (all of which look the same, by the way, and look the same as the ones in the Walking Dead House..) doesn't do anything. They're indistinguishable from guests to me. Just as dangerous. Just as slow moving. Just as hungry for my flesh.

Now, what I was thinking was going to happen was that they were going to pump more and more zombies - I'm sorry, "Walkers" (the zed word is ridiculous) - in over the course of the night until they were EVERYWHERE. But a theme park isn't very conducive to that I guess. So we're stuck with like.. Five zombies. Spread throughout the park. Booga booga!

I went into Herschel's barn and you know what was in there? A red light.

I got a lot of cool pix of the glowy words on the ground/buildings, but other than that ... What a waste. As far as I could tell there wasn't even anything in the RV (like the damn Skoolhouse bus).

So naturally my gf thinks it's like this every year. And it's tough to explain it's not. I'm like "one year as soon as you walked through the gates, the Wicked Witch was on a tower yelling at everyone, and you walk into this effed up version of Oz, then if you went the other way you ended up in this crazy Alice in Wonderland trippy craziness, then there was . . ." Etc. You all know what was there.

It becomes hard to belive when all you can see is ... Well, what's there now. I feel ... Cheated

By the "Scarezonse" that is. The houses were for the most part pretty awesome.

SET PIECES

Didn't seem new. Meh. I miss SCAREZONES!

BILL AND TED

Why is it that whenever I bring a girl to HHN, they want to go to Bill and Ted? Maybe I'm just a Grumpy Gus, but I don't get it ... It's all just a bunch of "OH THERES JUSTIN BIEBER HES FAMOUS HAHAHAHAHAH" ....... Bill and Ted are cool though......

Plus you're not allowed to take pix. So what else am I supposed to do? Watch people dance to that #$#@#$ "WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY" song?

I mean, I guess if you were a huge pop culture ... follower... you'd get some appreciation out of it but ... I don't know. To me, the only thing that makes it worth it are my pix - and my pix are AWESOME by the way. Until they told me to stop taking pix or .... I don't know, I'd have to watch the show again?

MEN IN BLACK

Yeah that's right. I rode the Men in Black ride. I do it every year. Sometimes more than once. Sometimes alone. Because I think it's fun. So what! ... Ahem.

TRANSFORMERS

I didn't ride this. Neither me nor my lady can do those rides where you sit in the moving cart and watch a screen (like the Simpsons) and it sounds to me like that's waht this is?

THE HOLLYWOOD RIP RIDE ROCKET

I WILL RIDE YOU THIS YEAR DAMMIT!

MERCH

Didn't get a chance to look through this much.

FOOD AND DRINK

We got gigantic turkey legs and they were awful. So gamy and gross, we both threw them out. That made me super-sad because that's usually one of my favorite parts of HHN. Plus they were like a thousand dollars. Also if you go to the bar and ask them to sell you a Coke or an Orange Juice...... They can't. Wtf. My lady wanted a coke and they had to pour it with two ounces short because "Thats where the liquor would go." Serious?

Oh and it was a thousand dollars.

FINAL VERDICT (For now)

March's verdict:

There's a lot of bugs to work out here because not all the material holds itself up. To explain what I mean, let's go back to Path of the Wicked again. It had the Wicked Witch, the crazy Scarecrow on stilts, the Tinman who would beat your butt, and even flying monkeys. Plus lighting and smoke and stuff. If the scareactors sucked, that still would've been awesome (sorry scareactors - you were all awesome anyway!)

Now that isn't to say the scareactors sucked. I don't think any of them did. I think they're just ... limited... by the material.

Gripe Number Two: Total number of scares so far this year: 0. Not one. That's never happened to me.

That said ... I think this is going to turn out to be a great year once they hit their stride and iron out the bugs as they always do. Someone from UO will step in and be like "Wait a minute it would be WAY more awesome if Bill and Ted showed up in helicopters, right?" and then.... So let it be written. And the world was a better place.

Though I think my main gripes aren't really something that can be smoothed over. The whole event was Walking Dead last year, and now there's a house and a PARK WIDE SCAREZONE? That ... I'm sorry, I think that's lazy. How do you get around it? Ten billion more zombies. But there are already tons of them wandering the park - and they paid to get in!

Now, my main gripe the first night - that it was all super-repetitive - was my fault. The houses we skipped totaly broke that up, so I was wrong. Especially Afterlife. That is just like a tailspin.

So . .

A few awesome houses, a few 'will be awesome' houses, and .... Resident Evil. Wth, Resident Evil?

Oh and a set of scarezones that is like The Godfather III - so far I'm choosing to deny it exits because it's so awful compared to the predecessors.

......At least I finally got to see a merman.

March's Lady's verdict:

I'm not even sure if she'll want to go back. Going to HHN with me involves a lot of "hang on lemme take a picture" and I only do that in the park... And without bothering the scareactors. But if all there is as far as Scarezones go is the same zombies over and over, that would get .. Very boring for her.

I know we'll go again on Halloween since - for reasons completely unfathomable to me - nobody goes to HHN on Halloween, so you can go in every house five hundred times.

But before then ?

Why go back?

At least her schedule at work makes it so that we can't get there before 10 on Weds or Thurs (so, free parking), and we're both off Sundays.

Oh. Yeah. We'll do the UTH tour and stay for the event that night if we can come up with 200 bucks.

Just my two cents.

[LV-426]

(The zombies are indistinguishable from guests to me)

I agree with this part.

Transformers is exactly like Spiderman.

Why did you skip Rocky Horror?

[marchofprogress]

@LV

Thank you - you reminded me of a question I wanted to ask ya'll.

When they do RHPS at HHN, do they do it like they do it when you go see a midnight showing? Ie, do they play the whole movie?

I'm going to be going with a couple RHPS fans in a week or two so I figured I 'd wait to see it with them if it's 90 minutes long.

Edit: Also, What's Spiderman like? (D'oh...)

Edited October 13, 2013 by marchofprogress

[Cody]

When they do RHPS at HHN, do they do it like they do it when you go see a midnight showing? Ie, do they play the whole movie?

It's not the entire film, but they do play appropriate clips on the stage screen. If I recall properly they do "Science Fiction Double Feature", "Dammit Janet", "Over at the Frankenstein Place", "The Time Warp", "Sweet Transvestite", "Sword of Damocles", "Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me", pretty much all of the floor show, and a final reprise of "Science Fiction Double Feature". It's focused mostly on the songs, with bits of non-song performance between them and the Criminologist scenes on the screen to tie in the plot. Callbacks are welcome, though staff has been heard of escorting out people who scream anything more than PG-13, including rape jokes.

[marchofprogress]

Cody - If I had a nickel for every time I've been escorted out of a place for yelling rape jokes .......