ThrillRide! Special Features

Captain Bloat's Shipwreck of Horror gets a big fat gold star for being inside the park's shark exhibit. VERY COOL. The interiors of these sorts of fishies-on-display joints are already pretty dark anyway, so that's a plus to begin with, then you've got frickin' sharks. On top of that, there was one very effective use of a false wall (I'm pretty sure), and some other little surprises. Maybe this could have had a few more ghouls in the general population to really put it over the top, but Shipwreck was the first Halloween maze I've ever been through that includes both zombies and sharks and you just cannot go wrong with that pairing, at least for me (big ups to my boy Lucio Fulci, yo).

Since my first trip through Pirates of the Caribbean as an impressionable youngster, I've been a big fan of talking skeletons, so this opening prop put a big smile on my face.

Our group's favorite maze of this Fest, no question at all, was Slaughter Farms. Lots of different environments, indoor and out, gory, suspenseful, genuinely badass. We went through twice because we dug it so much.

There's a nice set-up at the start with an ambient radio broadcast, period music interrupted by news reports of unpleasantness at the Happy Pig Farm.

The first segment is outdoors and there are signs of mayhem everywhere... piles of entrails, blood splatter on the walls... Mmm, mmm, good! The hanging clothes you have to walk through, great touch. It takes a while before any live actors come at you and that only heightens the anxiety. Look for the outhouse...

Once we do head indoors, the gore factor goes up considerably, as grandly presented by Urso Chappell, above. (Nice shirt, my friend!)

I don't know what happened to this guy, but A LOT happened to this guy and none of it was good.