Well it was a long 24 hours, but we did it. And... hey it wasn't that bad. In fact, it was downright smooth, and for that I'm elated.
However, that was solely due to strategy, luck and persistence. Without any we would have been screwed. Even on a Thursday night you can not do this event easily without basically winning a triple jackpot, and that's not a good thing.
So, anyways, here goes. My sister and I headed off from Vegas about 10:30 AM expecting to hit traffic, delaying our arrival to Universal. Here's where luck hit us first: I realize upon driving that for the first time in a long while, I had a passenger alongside me so we scooted into the carpool lane and missed a good thirty minutes worth of traffic. Instead of the planned 3:30, I found myself parking at Citywalk at 2:30.
Upon entering, "luck" hit us again. Originally we planned on having lunch with my sister's friend in Los Angeles which would've had us getting to early entry about 5-ish. He ended up cancelling, and we quickly found ourselves bored after mulling around CityWalk for an hour and a half. Naturally we just headed to the entrance and scrambled into line, second runner-up. Thanks to this persistence (and my knowledge of where early entry exactly "empties" out), we kept finding ourselves right after the front edge whenever the line moved forward.
After a nice conversation with a park services lead on the unfortunate (and misguided) replacement of HoH, they let us in and this was probably the worst part of the event for us. Years of confident theme park striding both employed and as a tourist had me swiftly making my way forward, but my sister wasn't exactly prepared for it so she basically hung onto me. And yeah, this was a mile-long walk that just took the wind out of us. It was bad enough marching down the StarWay, but then you're faced with the fierce bursts of running energy by the crowds to the edge of the lower lot. We were already sweating bullets and the hilly nearly half-mile walk to the backlot seemed near impossible... but y'know, to
do this event enjoyably you HAD to tough it. Luckily the numerous team members along the way wondrously put a halt to the devilish runners, giving us a welcome slow pace to the backlot. Still, it was rough. A nice break of a tram ride would've been nice right about here, just saying.
By the time we made our way through Terminus (I guess... twice? Jeez I think you can go through it a total of four times in this event!), our crew (which included a nice couple we met while waiting upstairs earlier) were a wheezing, coughing, sweaty mess. Yet The Walking Dead was a walk-on (heh), so there is literally no time to lose. If you're in amazing shape, go on a Thursday, love patiently waiting for two hours with great navigation of USH and have incredible persistence, you can have a terrific time at HHN this year without an FOL!
Yet breathlessness be damned, we trudged through the prison. I immediately had a sense of deja vu, but it was a good one... because that two-story prison scene is just as awesome as it was last year. This also had a better back half, and that might just be because season 4 was a better season than 3. Lots of neat moments, and a good length to it (my sister, not used to haunts, thought it was short at first)... yeah the brand is tired but hey at least they keep improving on the maze portion. And the Terminus scare zone (the real one, not the strobey one) was nice but not nearly as fantastic as last year's. My sister, a huge Walking Dead fan, thought everything was absolutely amazing. So maybe there's something to be said for the fans.
So we climb out of TWD and early entry briefly leads you straight into the AVP queue. And yeah... now I was stoked. Everybody in line was anxiously awaiting going in. Earlier when the mic girl was getting the crowds riled up on the upper lot prior to release, the loudest wailing cheer was for this maze. You could feel the excitement in the air. It was a brisk ten minute wait and allowed myself to cool off and wipe down all the sweat on my forehead. But man, the adrenaline rushed right back in upon entering. I was expecting it to be awesome. And guess what? It was not awesome.
IT WAS EXTREMELY, RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME! Hands down the coolest haunt I've ever walked through in my entire life. The build-up in the forest with no scares was brilliant, and the detail was out-of-this-world. (hah) I just love the execution of all of the scares (the Alien/Predator gauntlet ones especially), and including just about everything you would want out of this kind of maze. The puppets were fantastic, and that queen at the end was breathtaking. We actually just... stood there when coming upon it. It's rude and holds up capacity and never in a million years in any other maze would I do that. But this deserved that rule-breaking, just for a moment. Absolutely pure wow. I both feel like they should and shouldn't bring this back next year. On one hand, I'd go nuts to see it again, on the other hand there's no way they could top it. Might as well be a one-hit wonder than something that becomes tired.
So we're just absolutely re-energized, and early entry being kinda awesome despite the workout gave my sister and I a chance to hop into a short, ten minute wait to experience Walking Dead again. This was neat since we were kind of out-of-it for the first go-around of this maze. We got to appreciate it more. Upon exiting we considered doing AVP again, but it was already a well-deserved 35 minute wait and our momentum was way too grand to slow it down like that, even on such an amazing maze.
Til Dusk Til Dawn had a 10-minute wait and it just reached 7:00, so we decided "what the hell?" and gave it a go. I made a note of Murdy's password and repeated it to the Gecko brothers. They responded by... showing me a drawing in their book. This held up the line and made me scratch my head. I guess little souvenir business cards were just too expensive for ol Universal this year. So we headed inside the seedy strip joint, and tried making sense of it. The storyline was simple, the scares good and the details were absolutely fantastic but overall the maze didn't leave a huge impact on us. My sister and I joked slightly about how much that stripper in the beginning must be groped throughout the night, and that was basically the highlight from TDTD for me. (...okay the half-naked girl helped a little too) Not bad, just a bit forgettable.
So we make the hike back to the lower lot and I fish around Transformers for some possible passes. A no-go, apparently only top tier managers have access to them this year due to capacity issues. Yikes. But as always we get sent through Gate A and end up giving our feet a well-deserved four minute rest in Evac. I literally spent the entire ride appreciating the sensation of not walking.
By this time it's 7:30, and we gear down the path for surely a long wait for American Werewolf in London. The event will finally catch up with us and this is where we grind to a halt, right?
Nope. Luck strikes again. AWiL was a
five minute wait! We all know the JP extended queue maze has a ridiculously lengthy line to walk thru no matter what, which basically composed of nearly all of our waiting time. The maze was almost as great as the Orlando version, with its amazing storytelling guiding you straight through the movie. The werewolf transformation scenes are absolutely incredible, and the Nazi dream sequence scene was fantastic. Then the wolf puppets came... and yeah, they are good and do the job well. However, you can tell they had to pump more money into AvP's puppets, since they weren't quite the complex ones from the prior Orlando maze which took it a bit of a notch down. Still, I throughouly enjoyed it and it remains my second favorite of the event.
Wanting to rest a bit more, we decide to take advantage of the walk-on Jurassic Park in the Dark and have a good laugh. Because the combination of unexpected water splashes, malfunctioning effects and strobe light dinosaur raves set to Guns n' Roses "Welcome to the Jungle" is just the thing for an immense amount of hilarity. (my sister didn't believe me when I told her the ending of the HHN version of JP) It was a welcome eight minute moment of calm, funny brevity in our night, not to mention the sitting aspect. I mean, I miss when that used to be over forty minutes long but mmmmmmmmaybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
I was wrestling on whether or not to just do Clowns 3D by myself, as my sister who was nervous about being nauseated by the effects refused to go. I had already viewed the maze on YouTube and it looked like an uninspired mish-mash of previous 3D mazes and the old Klownz scarezone of HHNs past. When passing the exit earlier in the night we heard nothing but disappointed comments (along with that annoying honking noise), and almost inexplicably had a 35 minute wait next to AWiL's 10! (what is wrong with people?!) I didn't want to destroy our amazing momentum by waiting for something I most likely would not care for very much, so it was the only thing we fully passed on that evening. Looking back on it, I have zero regrets. I have felt that 3D mazes and clowns need to go away from HHN if they carry on like this for a long while, and so I figure a boycott nicely fits that opinion.
Heading upstairs while briefly mocking the gigantic crowds descending, we immediately bolted for a 10-minute Terror Tram wait. The time was about near 8, so we were doing excellent. Shortly enough we were seated in the tram and on our way. Now remember: my sister is a huge Walking Dead nut, and absolutely adored both the maze and the backlot scare zone, and has never done Terror Tram in her life. And yet she did not care for it at all. (she said the season 4 clip on the way out was the best part) The main issue was that in a seeming effort to help capacity, trams were unloading faster than usual and very little maze hosts actually tried enforcing people to keep walking, resulting in humongous crowds bottlenecking it up at several points. People would just stop in their tracks if they felt like it and nobody said anything. While I was of course grumbling about the thing being old and tired, we both were frustrated at being sardine canned with a bunch of rowdy teenagers trying to act edgy and clever at every single moment, which also includes treating a maze line like a mosh pit.
Add this in with the fact that you have to go uphill which seems redundant and infuriating after having done the backlot walk twice... well yeah we really didn't enjoy the experience very much. At the very least the scareactors were very enthusiastic, which was nice. It was bad enough to the point where my sis, once again pretty much brand new to HHN immediately recognized a dead spot where a scare should've been, and she was 100% on-target. Embarrassing. The highlight for me? Walking off the tram and marveling at the sheer size of Hogwarts, now enclosed. There's something to be excited about.
We decided that the method of maze/ride/maze/ride was working out well for us, so we darted to The Simpsons Ride which hosted a 30-minute wait, figuring that we were fine at slowing down significantly for the rest of the event. (it was 8:45 by now, so yeah!) Wouldn't you know it but luck came upon us yet another time. Not only were we quickly ushered in the downstairs, more sedate basement queue, but we were a group of 2 behind large groups of nine and ten, so we waited... maybe four minutes at best before we took our spot in the midway. My sister enjoyed the ride and that's all that matters, it was sure The Simpsons Ride but we barely waited for it and that was a miracle that I can't really swat at.
So it's 9 and we're nearly done to our disbelief and we decide to finally take it real slow and grab some food. We speed over to Hollywood Grill (not before I shed a manly tear at the sight of the darkened Castle Theater, of course) and grab some chicken tenders. I really wanted Pibb Xtra but the Coke Freestyle machines were down (what a shock) which was a bit of a bummer, but whatever. Our next maze up on the list was Face Off, which I wanted to do solely to say goodbye to HoH. My sister is a fan of the show which helped her cause of wanting to see it as well. When we reached Hollywood Grill the wait time was 35 minutes. To our amazement, during the course of the meal, luck joined us one last time that evening as we watched the queue plummet from 35 to
10 minutes!!! All in the course of a simple 15-minute span. So we tossed our food, headed across the street and went straight in.
It's sad HOH is leaving, and I really wanted to like this one. Heck, I got the most scared out of this maze than any other. But it's not because it did its thing well, it's because the entire thing was incoherent as hell. The entire maze is predicated off the idea of showing off these costumes, yet over half are unable to be witnessed due to the horrid strobe lighting effects and sudden pitch black darkness. Sometimes I got the chance to appreciate the lovely House sets but mostly it was just wondering what was going on and being surprised by a scare actor who I honestly wasn't sure who they were because I can't make sense of anything. But I saw that flux capacitor one last time so that's okay I guess? Meh. We both agreed this one was a hot mess.
We decided to loop around to the scarezones. Dark Christmas was just absolutely a joy in every which way. One stilt walker refused to let my sister into the bathroom, which was hilarious. We couldn't get enough of the darn thing and it needs to come back next year as a full blown maze. It's too good not to. Just the exact type of twisted humorous merriment this event needs. (although a SHOW would help)
Mask-A-Raid was neat but kind of just there. I can say the same thing about The Purge since very little scareactors seemed to be roaming. We watched a tiny bit of the auctioneer which was a neat little piece of entertainment, but not quite enough. After a Dippin Dots purchase, we plunged into the 40 minute wait for Dracula Untold. This was the longest wait we had to do for a maze all night, and it wasn't even 40 minutes! The actual waiting time seemed to be more in the ballpark of 20.
I'm not sure if 20 minutes was worth it. I mean, I went in with low expectations and the maze both managed to frustrate me and surprise me. For every neat, innovative scare and set pieces (the catacombs, the paintings, the outdoor scenes), there was an amazingly incoherent mess right next to it (the black hallways, the burning TV set walls, and my favorite: the purple drapes scene)... plus nothing in the maze past the challis scene really made much sense story-wise. We walked out confused, for sure. It's not the worst thing the event has to offer and certainly has good along with bad... but wow. And we thought Face Off was a hot mess!
Not wanting to end the night on a sour note, and the fact that it was 11 made me suggest Despicable Me. My sister had not ridden it yet and the wait time was 40 minutes. Knowing how lucky we had been all night, we decided to take the risk. And yeah... luck ditched us. The line ballooned to 50 minutes while inside when five minutes in it went to a dead halt and theater one was shuttered, slashing capacity in half. We had already committed, so we found ourselves watching the queue loop over and over while the line rarely moved. I weep for anyone who waits in line for Orlando's version. My sis thought the ride, after we finally made it in after what seemed like an eternity, was funny and cute but we both agreed that the wait wasn't worth it. Heading out, I looked over to Silly Swirly as people looked over to it almost like they would ride it... and y'know... take people... off the streets. Hmm.
So we headed out just prior to midnight and my sister really liked it. Oh, if only she could've seen Bill and Ted.
Anyways, overall I quite enjoyed this event despite many misgivings but I feel like if we weren't so lucky and so persistent that it could've easily have been different. And that shouldn't be the case... it should be great no matter what. The mood feels stifled by both the construction walls and the lack of a show, so while there was energy, it wasn't exactly the same as years past. The event's energy and fun seemed contained to the backlot and was intermittent everywhere else.
I feel like a broken record but I really, really don't care. Despite what Murdy said, bring back Bill and Ted. Make Horror Nights not about being lucky and strategic to have fun, but about just... being fun.
Mazes from favorite to least:
1) Alien vs Predator
2) American Werewolf in London
3) The Walking Dead
4) Til Dusk Til Dawn
5) Face Off (if only for HOH)
6) Dracula Untold
7) Terror Tram
And of course, I didn't experience Clowns so it can't count. But I have a feeling it would've been right above Terror Tram. Especially if I waited over thirty minutes for it.
Now I must sleep...
...bring back Bill and Ted.
