Where do I begin...
Ok, when it comes to being "extreme", this place does it. That's about as positive as I can be. Oh, and they have lots of really cool looking animatronics (but they aren't scary so they don't really do anything for the haunt besides look cool)
Now for the negative. There really aren't any signs for it until you get right up to the parking lot, and the parking lot isn't very well lit at all. Basically it looks like somebody's side yard where they took a oil drum and started a bonfire in it for the lot attendant, that's about the extent of the lighting other than your headlights. They charge for parking, which considering just a REGULAR ticket is close to $30 seems like just another way to take even more of your money.
Once we walked up to the actual venue I asked the concession stand person where the ticket booth was, she pointed and said "it's over there" as though I were annoying her by asking. Granted, it's a big barn with the word "tickets" written on it, but I didn't see it right away.
In any case, we finally get our tickets and get in line. It's opening night (a few years back now) and they were about an hour to an hour and a half late to open, which having been in the industry I understand it happens, but still was annoying as it was cold and dreary for being that early in the season and we didn't want to lose our spot by walking around to kill time.
When we finally get to go in it's very dark, very rushed, and just not that great. There were piston noises that should have been covered up with a cd player or some kind of sound, and we could see bright shiny silver pistons on the otherwise dead rotting creatures that should have been somehow covered. The animatronics look cool, I'll give them that, but they're not scary and some of them didn't work when we went through.
In one of the scenes we went through there were girls dressed up like juggalos and they were just dancing around on the stage like it was a strip club or something. No scares, didn't even make an attempt to do anything, just stood there dancing with their juggalo makeup on. What a waste of space.
The rest of the actors are sub par with the exception of maybe one or two that seemed to know what they were doing. The others however wore cheap latex masks like you get at the costume stores, and had no dialogue other than to jump out and say "rawr", again with the exception of maybe 1 or 2. Many of the scenes were hard to see until you were walking past them, we had to keep looking behind us to actually see anything.
One of the scenes outside is sort of a chain link fence maze, and while we were going through there an actor with a chainsaw accidentally stepped up on my leg as I was walking which broke the skin and drew blood. Granted it was an accident, but I've heard other stories about people getting black eyes from being whacked in the head with chainsaws because their people are very out of control and in your face about it. In addition to that my wife had surgery on her arm to fix a broken bone over the summer and although it was healed, it still hurt her, and they bumped into her arm pretty hard a couple different times, not to intentionally hit her arm but just the fact that they are so careless that you can literally leave there with bruises. They also pulled on her hair several times. By the time we left we were both just angry.
We even went back another time or two to give it a fair chance, but our follow up experiences were no better than the first time. I have not met a single person who has gone to the hoochie and actually said they liked it. I'm not saying they aren't out there, I'm saying that between running a local haunt for 6 years, dealing with various actors/entertainers/makeup artists/etc, and just talking with customers and other various people/friends/associates/etc I have yet to find someone who actually says they like going there.
Having done the haunt thing myself, I get the impression that the owner puts up the cash for expensive props but then doesn't take the time to actually go through, see it in action, and make sure everything is how it should be. I would think if he actually did that, then the experience would be a lot better. Then again they get so much business simply by "claiming" to be the best and spending so much on advertising that they probably don't care who they piss off anyway because there will be 100 more people to take their place. Such a shame, this place has so much potential to be good, but because of the dynamics of the ownership and the mentality of those who work there I doubt it will ever amount to much more than a place where you can pay $25 to get roughed up, plus whatever gas money and time for the distance you drove to get there and back. read more