I decided to kick off my 2007 Halloween season by visiting a new attraction that I'd never checked out before. The choice was the Scare Brothers in Hatboro, PA. After dark, we headed out for Hatboro and arrived to a mostly empty lot. It seemed like the hired talent, in full monster makeup, were all just kind of milling about around their cars. We soon learned that this was due to the attraction being shut down for not getting a proper fire code inspection. Not wanting to waste the awesome fall weather, I headed to an old standby - the Horrorfest at Shadybrook Farms. But apparently Horrorfest 2007 opens on Sept 29th, so showing up on the 28th didn't do much good. Heading home, I recalled one other haunted attraction that was vaguely on the way and figured it was worth a shot to salvage the night even if we'd already been to it three times in the last 5 years. Midnight Productions is the company who put together the Payne's Asylum haunt that I visited in 2005 and the Motel attraction for a few years before that. Their haunted house is always a quality event, but we decided to skip it since we've done it so many times and we purchased tickets for the hayride and the brand new CLOWN VORTEX. I feel obligated to display CLOWN VORTEX in this manner, because insane text formatting is the only befitting tribute I can give to a name that absurd. I believe that this instense multi-hued text accurately depicts the terror you feel when you're surprised in the night by some unholy rainbow wig. As it turns out, we probably should have stuck with the Asylum attraction. And I also should've read my review of the hayride from two years ago before coming back. The hayride was even worse this time. Almost nothing happened. And when we did finally encounter some ghosties, the actors were impressively uncommitted to their roles. There was also the disappointment of large beast and demon contraptions that seemed like they would be about to come to animatronic life as we passed them, but instead they just remained motionless and poorly lit. On a scale from lame to crappy, this hayride scored an "ughhhhh". The CLOWN VORTEX was kind of awesome for the few seconds that it lasted. It had a few decent live clown costumes, some nice creepy clown dolls, and a wonderful spinning tube of disorientation. But then after walking about 20 yards we were deposited in one of the dreaded "hallway of complete, annoying darkness where you just have to feel your way around and the only scary thing is wondering if you're going to trip on something because you can't see your hand in front of your face." Fortunately, this area did not go on for a very long time. But most unfortunately, by the time we left it the entire vortex had ended less than two minutes from when we entered. The exit of the CLOWN VORTEX was quite close to a large stage with live music where there was some kind of high school battle of the bands going on. The songwriting and performance of the band we saw was easily the most frightening part of our evening. So yeah, both of these haunts totally honked, but it was a nice excuse to enjoy a beautiful night - especially when this wasn't even our second choice for the evening's haunting events. But I would still recommend a journey to Midnight Productions because the Asylum is always a sweet time. Just stay away from the hayride and the vortex while you're there. |