My haunted excursion number three for 2009 was as part of a group of 11 people at Scare Brothers in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. I actually had tried to visit this place a couple years ago without success, as they'd been shut down for some kind of permit violation or something. But they're certainly up and running and doing good business this year, in spite of the fact that the place is quite hard to find as it's set back off the road and the signs for it are extremely poorly lit (well, not lit at all) and are impossible to see in the dark. They opened at 7pm, and we had a dinner reservation at 8:45 so we showed up when the opened and got right in line. They didn't actually start letting people in until 7:15 or 7:20, so there was a good chunk of waiting before the line started to move. Fortunately, it passed quickly because there were a few actors patrolling the line to keep things interesting - one knife-wielding dude was particularly committed to his bit with a high pitched lunatic laugh and was a pleasure to watch. Once we got to the front of the line, we had our picture taken with a dude in a sweet ghoul costume who was making outstandingly hilarious groaning noises the whole time. I'm sure the pictures were funny, but we didn't even bother to look because after paying twenty five bucks to get in, nobody was interested in paying some additional exorbitant fee for a group photo. That sort of behavior is reserved for days of cash burning on the Wildwood boardwalk rollercoasters. After our delightful 45 seconds with the ghoul, we were treated to another wait in line, only this time longer and more boring. We finally got into the entrance of the haunted house around 8:10, over an hour after arriving. They gave the usual chat about rules before we entered, but instead of the ubiquitous "no touching" policy at every haunt I've ever attended, there was a policy of "the actors can touch you, but you cannot touch them." This concept seems absolutely absurd to me, and I immediately told the rules-girl, "Well, that seems unfair." She shrugged and replied, "Yeah, I guess." Fortunately, the first section of the haunted house was totally awesome. The costumes ruled, the props were great, and the actors were wild and screaming. We were treated to about five minutes of this sweet walkthrough until being deposited into a decidedly much less excellent area, which was just a winding, pitch-black passage that went on FOREVER. Most haunted houses usually have a bit of the pitch black passage experience, and it can certainly be effective in small doses. But this was just absurdly long and tedious. Then halfway through, it was exacerbated by the group of idiots in front of us who had failed to grasp the concept of "put your hand on the wall and walk forward until you have to turn" and had gotten themselves turned around walking backward through the halls until they collided with us. The combination of their crippling ineptitude and their bodily wideness forced us to just shove them slowly forward toward the exit rather than passing by them. I felt quite defeated after leaving the annoying, black tunnel because we immediately ended up in another line. Not only that, but from this point I could see another future line that we'd have to wait in after we got out of section two. It was looking less and less likely that we'd be able to make our dinner reservation on time, despite giving ourselves a seemingly ample hour and forty-five minutes of time. The second area was a generic clown thing. More good costumes, plenty of committed actors, and some excellent mask replicas from Killer Klowns from Outer Space (a film you should watch immediately if you haven't seen it, because it's so wonderfully ridiculous). In the final room here, we were surrounded by a ton of doors in every direction. All except one were fake doors, and if you tried to go for the real exit, there was a clown attempting to prevent you from getting though - kind of a cool funhouse idea. Our Clown Adventure was brief and after a few minutes we were back out into another Line Adventure. By the time we finally got into the last haunted walkthrough, I was hungry and cranky, as we'd been here for two hours already and were now 15 minutes past our dinner reservation. This area had a movie-based theme, with characters like Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason all appearing. Unfortunately, the touchiness of the actors came heavily into play in here, culminating in some stupid zombie girl pulling Maggie's hair. I wanted to slap her in her stupid zombie face. How the hell does anyone think that people want to pay money to come here and have some moron pull their hair? Adding to my crankiness was the fact that, despite repeatedly stopping to wait for them to get ahead of us, our same group of backwards-walking lethargios kept holding us up and ruining every surprise for us, as their hopeless sluggishness would prevent any of the actors from being ready for us coming behind them. Man, I hate everyone. Anyway, by the time we were finished I just wanted to get the hell out of there and eat. Thinking back on it all a few days later, the setup in this place was actually really cool, but it's honestly pretty impossible to stay motivated about something while waiting around for two hours. The walkthroughs were pretty spacious and could definitely accommodate slightly larger groups - if they let through 1.5x as many people per group, we'd probably all be out in an hour and fifteen instead of two hours, and everyone would be way happier. And seriously, the touching has got to go. Almost all of it was perfectly harmless, but it really added nothing to the experience. All it takes is one fool pulling hair to make the whole policy go to crap.
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