I've got a hoodie on again, so you know that means it's time to get out and explore the ridiculous Halloween activities within reasonable driving distance of our house. We started off 2009 with a trip to the Corner of Chaos in East Windsor, NJ (beware: if you click through that link, they've got one of those awful websites that plays sound clips with no way to mute or turn them off). Apparently this place has been around for a few years and is pretty nearby, but we'd never realized it existed until now. The Corner of Chaos features three outdoor haunted trails - Devil's Den, Trail of Treachery, and the Barbaric Barnyard. Or at least it should've been three in theory, but the Barbaric Barnyard was not yet open. Got to admit that was a bit of a bummer because Barbaric Barnyard is a pretty sweet name, and I can just picture the club-wielding radioactive humane-swine hybrid barbarians we would've met there. They'd have been wearing bear-skin singlets and guzzling flagons of trough-brewed Hogsmeade (sorry for the bad Harry Potter joke). Anyway, I still had pretty high hopes for the place because outdoor trails are probably my favorite kind of haunts since I can enjoy the awesome fall weather and not be stuck on a lame-ass hayride. Each trail was $12.99; rather odd considering that these places do business in cash and I can't remember ever seeing one that wasn't rounded to a whole dollar amount before. They must have a whole lot of pennies they want to get rid of. Since there was no price break for buying tickets for two trails, we decided to just start with one (Devil's Den) and just buy the other one if we were up for it after finishing the first trail. I initially assumed we'd have a good chance of doing the second trail since the place was empty this early in the season, and we'd probably get through quickly. I learned quickly that I was extremely wrong to have made that assumption because Corner of Chaos hadn't exactly focused on efficiency when training their staff. Our first 45 minutes consisted of standing in three lines with the same twenty people - the only twenty people waiting to get into any of the trails. Based on the emptiness of the parking lot and the lack of other visible patrons, it appeared that the only real reason we were subject to so many delays was that the college-age dudes in charge of letting groups through were far more interested in chatting up all the teenage girls in line than actually doing their job. If there are three things I look for in a haunted house attraction, they are probably waiting in pointless lines, watching the actors break character constantly to flirt with people, and listening to the maddening conversations of idiot teens who think they're terribly clever because they called something "gay." Wow, I really sound like a grumpy old man. When we finally got to the front of the last line, the kid who was running the queue disappeared again to go fraternize and we just decided to go in on our own once we realized he had completely forgotten about us. Once on the Devil's Den trail, it was a little while before we even encountered any haunters. That was a bit of a running theme, as the trail was fairly long (took about 30 minutes to get through) and the actors were a bit sparse. In general, the hired help in these woods left a lot to be desired. The bulk of the costumes simply involved a kid in jeans and a hoodie wearing a mask. And the pervasive scare strategy was a casual hop out from behind a tree, followed by a weak growl or grunting sound. There were certainly some exceptions to this, including a girl with a shriek of extraordinary amplitude and a guy making some kind of sucking-in dinosaur screech. I was also into the girl that crab walked through the leaves after us for a good 25 or 30 yards, and I complimented her on her commitment to the bit. The trail went on for quite a while without a ton of variation. It offered precious little in the way of decoration – I can’t remember a single prop or rubber corpse or fake cobweb or animatronic beast. There was just one solitary “graveyard” setup, with some sharpie-on-cardboard-and-proud-of-it headstones with clever text like “Here Lies Bob” and “Rubinstein” and so forth. Definitely a good three or four minutes of man power went into putting together that art show. There were also three brief indoor passages of the trail, which were all identical and simply involved walking into a black plastic sheet and meandering forward for 30 seconds in the dark before coming out through another piece of plastic. Actually, I do now recall that one of them mixed it up a bit by draping some smelly burlap in there. Good times. The trail ended and we were treated to waiting around some more. The trail exit is nowhere near the parking lot and we had to await the arrival of a tractor to come pick us up and drive us back. We could’ve easily gone into the other trail for free at this point because the attentive staff never even bothered to take our tickets, but we agreed it wouldn’t have been worth the time and just headed back to the car. I decided this year to implement a new rating system along with my haunted house reviews whereby I will break down the merits of each attraction by six key factors. So here we go!
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