Thorpe Park (FRIGHT NIGHT) Reviews - SPOILER ALERT

[MarkC]

This topic is purely just for Fright Night reviews! Write your reviews for the rest of the community to view! Hope you all have a spooktacular time at Fright Nights 2012 and that you share all your scare filled experiences!

-Cookie Dough A.K.A - Mark

[MarkC]

Review Of The Passing (by Go Merlin)

After our rave review last year of Experiment 10, we had high hopes of Thorpe Park pushing the boundaries yet again in the UK.

We had mixed opinions on this, which we will explain further on.

First of all, they group people into three groups, each one is then called forward in turn before the mandatory 'speech'. It consists of the expected lines, but with an added line on the end. "In this maze you will have a bag put over your head, if you are not comfortable with this, please leave now." Now this got several people looking uneasy; a great start!

After the speech they lead you into the original Hellgate entrance where they take your group photo. You then walk through into a Morgue with some kind of wallpaper of dead bodies in lockers. Very unnerving.

This is where you get the bag over your head. Right, so it's basically like one of those weird wrestling helmets that comes with a fake sumo wrestler suit that kids wear at carnivals. Oh, except that it's fully enclosed, but you can slightly see out the front.

Then you get walked through the next room into another room where you are shown a rather bizarre yet very creepy slideshow of images that, I assume, is of someone's life that ranges from birth to their murder. There were some very graphic images in the slideshow.

Then your group is split into two, as you are required to venture into either of two tunnels that are revealed in the wall. As I have only been through one of them (the left one), I can only comment on that one.

The left tunnel is pitch black, you can't even see your own hand in front of your face, let alone the person in front/behind, which could lead to some awkward apologies. Oh, and did I mention it's very very cramped so you have to go through on your hands and knees? Yeah, now you know what I mean by awkward apologies.

Anyway, this goes on for a while with numerous twists and turns, and perhaps screams. You then emerge in a distinctly familiar room (if you ever went in Hellgate). Yep! The rest of the maze is literally the second half of Hellgate, except you're still wearing the bag over your head. Don't get me wrong though, I liked it, and it did still work well! And credit to Thorpe Park there are some very creepy moments where I genuinely wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

And so after all this, you are greeted by staff where you give back your bag, and are directed to the exit... Or so you think!

The 'exit' is a completely white lit room, and when your half-group are all in the lights suddenly go out and UV lights turn on which reveals cryptic messages on the walls, which mostly state 'Burn In Hell' or words to the same effect.

A door then slides open to a very dark room with plastic drapes obstructing your view, an actor is hiding in here for one final scare. The exit is next, it's the same as the exit of Hellgate.

Overall we enjoyed The Passing, and it's a solid member of the Halloween line up for Thorpe Park.

The actors did well especially considering it was the first night with lots of people going through. We'll be back to make sure they keep this up!

Review Of Experiment 10 WITH NEW ENDING! - Thanks to Towers Nerd

We have been asked for details of what the new element in Experiment 10 is.

Spoiler for the rest of this post, I will walk you through the whole maze. We started by having a lady Dr who tells you all about the previous 9 experiments. She then took a liking to James who was asked to look up, down, left and right whilst shining a torch at him. We then were ushered into the decontamination room. This room was filled with gas (I think someone was eating cabbage earlier). The lights went out and it was silent. A few moments later they found the blown fuse and the lights were returned to an on state. One by one we were nicely asked to "put your hand on your heads. Now looser" and them "get in there subject 14". Real nice people those were and they gave us each a personal waiting room. Admittedly the rooms were a little cramped and a bit on the dark side, but they did come with added spiders, so the voice said. I like spiders but didn't see any of them. Maybe they were scared of me. After a few minutes we were asked to leave the nice little rooms and sent off down a long crawly tunnel. Here I made friends with the blokey in front of me. He was crawling much slower than I and it was dark. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. We were eventually allowed to stand up and entered a corridor of strobes and mirrors. This room didn't work as the strobes were too infrequent and there was too much background light. Next we were ushered by a very nice lady into a room with a window in it. There was a doctor and a patient. The patient was, it looked like, having his stomach removed. Weight loss the easy was. The doctor was washing her hands and suddenly the patient sits up. Shocked we watched the patient grab a spinny sawy thing and attack the poor defenceless doctor. Blood spurts at this point, luckily my right ear protected the rest of our party from the blood. The lights go off in the room and there's a huge crash. Then the door to the room and the patient rushes in to hug us all. The rest of the party didn't realise that all he wanted was a hug and ran away screaming out of the exit.

Edited October 12, 2012 by Sidders
: Don't double post unnecessarily.

[JackR]

Urgh, well what a piece of shi*t The Passing was... It was short, the scares were poor, the bags were awful and you even went outside at one point?! I fail to see how daylight shining through the walls and words written in luminous paint make a good scare maze. I feel ripped off that I'm actually paying another £6 for more goes...

E10 was much better than last year. The closets are still pretty scary even though I knew what to expect. There was somebody grabbing you through a hole in the roof in the tunnel and the ending was fab, if not a bit predictable. The girl I was with was crying by the time we got out of the closets, but it was good none the less.

I was disappointed by The Asylum. It was up to its usual old self but it seemed to lack some intensity. The grand finale was good as always and it was nice to see some new scenes.

Dare I say it, The Curse was easily the best maze of the night! The structure/theming seemed pretty solid, there was a decent use of effects and the acting was fab A great team of actors that worked together really well to get scares out of each group three or four times. Really good job on The Curse this year

I like to give each maze a few goes before I make a final judgement so I will report back at the end of Fright Nights with a proper review for them all.

[Paul123]

Went on Friday to Fright Nites, my thoughts.

Firstly, why no themeing around the park, I was disapointed they havent bothered to theme the park in anyway, Its not like the old days when they at least attempted to theme the park a little bit, the only changes here and there are some ride annoucements, but thats it, a bit poor.

Some live actors are going round the park this year, but they only come out at night, I thought they were quite good actually, and fitted into the theme well, they were really creating some good scares all round.

Crowd wise, it was brilliant, I had a feeling it was going to be quite empty, and so it proved, The Swarm was pretty much walk on from the afternoon, or 5 mins at most, and they were letting you sit where you like too. FF was doing about 5-6 laps all the time, pretty much all other rides had about a maxiumum of 5-10 min queues, Saw reached a peak of approx 30 mins, but died down a bit after that, The mazes had reasonable queues to be expected, The Curse only reached a max of 5-10 mins all day, Experiement 10 probably reached around 30 mins, and Asylum about the same,The Passing had very short queues when it opened, but when I went past it late around 8PM, the queue shot up to what looked like a good 20 mins or so.

OK,So mazes review time.

The Curse - Really enjoyed it this year, there was definatly more scares than usual, and more actors it seemed,at least 2 actors did a great job by following behind us for a while, the ending seemed different to what I remember too.

The Asylum - Still the same old usual maze, but I still like it like this, some very good scare tactics by the actors with a fair bit of grabbing,I still miss Chainsaw guy at the end because it worked so well the way he used to run down that corridor when you were about half way down chasing you out, although "mad Girl" at the end this year as I like to call her was excellent,not letting us out at first, and then pretty much throwing us out the maze, worked well

Experimemt 10 - I cant compare this to last year, as I didnt go last year, but I thought it was quite a good maze, Its quite intimidating with very good interaction from the actors, pushing you about a bit, Going in the little room alone works quite well building up the suspense, Now sadly I got the route with the dark corridors and tunnels(would have liked to have tryed the tunnel route as I hear it is much better) but it still worked well, the ending was quite good with everyone bolting towards the exit screaming.

The Passing - OK so just to confirm a few things, You can pay for this maze on the day(It is NOT strictly advanced booking only) and its the same price on the day(£3) so you can pretty much turn up and get a time slot for whenever you want, there is not unlimited slots though so they will run out if its really busy, Obviously you do need to pay for this maze though, there is NO standby queue.

Also you do go through in Groups, It is not a "going through on your own" type maze, at one point, you can kinda continue going through on your own, but guess the majority of people will always still go through in groups, ok so spoiler time

I felt the maze was "good" but there is massive room for improvement,It starts off ok with a speach on how you have commited crimes, and you are being sentanced to death, you are then lead into another room where you are placed the bag on your head which is basiclly a soft covered helmet which you can still see through(Imagine the kind of helmet you wear if you were doing fencing) You then see a brief film about executions and death, and then you are lead through 1 of two tunnels which goes slighty uphill/downhil,around a few corners etc and then eventually come together, Its quite funny when they join as you tend to reach out and grab other people's hands, after the tunnel, you could continue on your own if you wish, but we all waited until we were together, the rest of the maze was good, but there was'nt many decent scares, and sadly it all goes off storywise, and it just ends really abrupt as if for you to say "is that it" it then does end with another small room wich leads to one more suprise, but it still doesnt seem a satisfactory ending, I really was expecting more, It hardly the most intense,gripping maze out there. Overall Not bad I guess, but If this returns next year, I really hope for a massive improvement.

I ended the day with night riding(Well thats what Fright Nites is all about) on The Swarm,Stealth and NI, The Swarm is excellent in the dark, and really delivered a kick ass ride, The Front Row was just special,I forgot how good NI was in the dark too, again very good, and Stealth was the usual excellent ride after dark too.

Overall Not a Bad Fright Nites event, The Passing could do better but Experiement 10,Asylum and the Curse are all up to a good high standard, and Night Riding Excellent as usual. Bring it all on next year I say

[Joegibbon]

I went yesterday, and I was very disspaointed with the passing. It seems they rely far too heavily on the bag scaring people. If, like me, you are fine with the bag then the maze is a complete let down with the only interesting bits being the tunnel and the two actors who put the bag on your head. It was far too light inside the maze and you could see perfectly well with the bag on. The ending is pointless aswell and seeing as you have to pay for the maze I felt thoroughly let down. If this returns next year they really need to up the standard.

Experiment 10 however was amazing. Having missed this last year I was determined to go on this time round. It starts off with quite a long introduction to what the experiment is about (eyes being windows to the soul) with the actor picking out and interacting with a few people in the group. Next was the decontamination chamber that filled with smoke and then went dark. The extraction fans then kicked in and the lights cam back on. I thought this was quite an interesting effect even if it wasn't very scary. Two actors burst in and start picking people to go left or right. They then pushed everyone into separate cells that were pitch black, and me, my cousin and my brother each had something different in our cells. Mine had string from the ceiling and sprayed quite a lot of water at me, my cousin got water dripped on him constantly whilst my brother supposedly had an actor in there who was breathing down his neck. After about a minute and a half we were let out and I was pushed down a tunnel with actors appearing through windows and shining torches at us. The next room was where the group met back up and what followed was you general scare maze with patients grabbing you and asking for help. You then go through some doors into the end scene, which is a tv screen with a doctor getting ready to operate on a patient, and the patient gets up and picks up a buzz saw and kills the doctor. Then an actor runs out and shouts at everyone to get out while you still can.

I was extremely impressed with this maze especially the splitting of the group and putting you on your own.

The asylum was also very good although it didn't seem to have changed much from last year, it was still filled with smoke and mainly made up of wire fences and mirrors. Still a very strong maze.

Last year I also missed out the curse, so wanted to try it out this year. I had heard bad things about it so I went in expecting the worst, but it turned out to be quite good. The experience was made better by the four men at the front of the group who screamed in terror at everything and kept trying to back away from the actors. We had to literally push them through the maze. All in all the maze was quite good, and not as bad as I'd heard.

I was also surprised at the short queues for the major rides, with the swarm being almost walk-on at night so we got three night rides on that and then nemesis inferno was also walk-on so we had two rides on that.