Netherworld ’09 Review

Due to the beneficence of one of my regulars, I dragged my happy corpse up to Norcross to see Netherworld.

It starts upon arrival– the best of Netherworld’s actors roam wild outside the two walk-through haunts; terrifying wanderers and queuers alike.  I saw ten characters– the “aggressives”: a gold-skinned demon; a lanky, leather-clad goblin; a simple zombie in rags; and another zombie that looked like Rick James would look if you dug him up and tossed a top hat on him.  These were armed with metal clacker gloves and metal knee guards that made an unholy racket and put off sparks when struck against the McAdam.  The more mellow cast members included a gentlemanly, antebellum vampire in classic “vamp face” and dirty greyscale; a grave-digger ghoul armed with shovel; the eight-foot puppet “Reaper” and his generic “dark mistress” keeper; and the creepiest of the creepys, a seriously twisted baby doll.

Netherworld is two haunts– Blood Night and Zombie Rampage.  I did Blood Night first, though in hindsight I’d probably reverse that.  While queuing for about a half hour, I enjoyed watching the aggressive roamers scare the living shit out of anyone likely to scream or just not paying attention.  I worked with the Southern Gentleman vamp to convince a girl attending with two friends to not back out. This is a really good time to point out that I really can’t emphasize enough how completely awesome the cast and staff were.  The Gentleman ended up escorting her through the entire Blood Night haunt, with her on his arm to make sure she made she through and had a good time.  The ticket taker, seeing I was alone, asked if I wanted to go through and appreciate the detail of the sets, and gave me plenty of room fore and aft to really enjoy the haunt solo.  It’s been neigh-on 15 years since I’ve been through a professional haunt purely as a rube, so this was especially awesome.

The vampire theme of Blood Night is very loose.  It’s really more of a progressively worsening nightmare.  The free walk-through is peopled mostly with live actors, with a handful of automated gags.  My favorite room was the vertigo tunnel– a glow-paint-spattered, rotating drum with a tilting bridge through the center.  It’s impossible to walk straight across this thing.  You will stumble like a man in the depths of an ether fit, and this one has a paint-and-gore-splashed ghouless edging slowly toward you from the opposite end of the bridge– impossible to cross without passing within an inch of her. Keep that in mind; there’s some seriously tight fits and close contact here. There’s some genuinely brilliant scares, I’m intensely difficult to scare, and from the tunnel on, Blood Night had me clenched down and tittering like a maniac. The walk-through, at my admittedly leisurely pace, took about half to three-quarters of an hour.

I spent a few minutes outside talking shop with the Gentleman to come down little from the excellent adrenalin high I was on, and, still buzzing, proceeded down the hill to Zombie Rampage.  The walk-up for ZR is certainly higher on spectacle than Blood Night– from the huge projection screen playing the set-up skit to the lab-coated maniac enthusiastically imploring rubes to touch his Madagascar-massive cockroaches (which of course sets them up for surprise scares from the aggressive roamers).  The haunt is a group walk-through, so I was appended to the double date ahead of me.  The need for groups was clear early on– Zombie Rampage is comprised largely of automated gags, and since I was at the rear, I didn’t catch the brunt of the scares.  Luckily, only one of the four ahead of me wasn’t a screamer, so I got some old-fashioned satisfaction at watching other people– a big alpha male among them– piss their britches.  The high point came in the center point of the haunt with a large wind-around room alive (heh) with zombies; many of whom followed us a good ways down the next hall at very close range.  Zombie Rampage took about fifteen to twenty minutes.  While nowhere near as intense as Blood Night, it did not disappoint.

It’s important to note that these are three-dimensional haunts– the gags come literally from all sides.  I had creatures following me for entire halls and dropping down from the ceiling. In one memorable room, there were, I kid you not, feather dusters dropped on poles to grace face, neck and shoulders.  It worked.  I jumped like crazy.  Best thing I can say about Netherworld is that it scared me.  That’s hard to do.  It is a professional, superbly executed haunt.  Good job guys, and Happy Halloween.