2016 Event Reviews

Zombies have been around for many decades, but they have taken on a surge of popularity due to the hit TV show 'The Walking Dead'. It shouldn't surprise anyone then that there's a haunted attraction based solely on zombies, and this one is completely interactive! For whatever reason, it's never been reviewed here on Haunted Wisconsin, either by anyone on the Review Crew or by a visitor. That is, until now!

I wasn't sure what to expect as I pulled up to Zombie Shoot. We had to park on the road as there were many visitors on this clear and cool Saturday night. A local dj was spinning the tunes, while several creatures danced to the beat and entertained those in line. The actors walking around were not really scary, but they were extremely entertaining and fun to watch! There was a good half hour wait just to get the tickets, and this was before the main waiting area. I would highly recommend the fast pass and also order your tickets online to save you time. Although people were here obviously for the Zombie Shoot, I was surprised to learn that there were two other activities: Zombie Laser Tag and Haunted Wicked Woods.

Zombie Shoot: Wow, the wait for this attraction was quite long. With all the people here... I'm still amazed that I've never been here! Again, there is a fast pass option you might want to consider as the wait this night was several hours. When we were done waiting, we boarded a bus and sat in front of mounted paint ball guns aiming out the windows. After going over the brief ground rules, the bus departed and we were on our way. It started out slow at first with the zombies, a few here and there. But as our ride continued they were coming from everywhere! There were some pretty incredible moments that I do not want to ruin for our dear readers, but trust me when I say that this was a extremely fun and cool experience! As a avid haunt fan, this was a first for me and I loved it!

Zombie Laser Tag: We decided to go to the laser tag area as the line appeared to be shorter. We waited about 45 minutes to play, which dragged because we were not near the entertainment. If you've ever played laser tag before, this is not much different. With that said, I never have played it outside at night, so that was a fun experience. At one point a zombie popped up and gave a few players a good scare.

Haunted Wicked Woods: While this area also did not have an organized line like the Zombie Shoot, it did have a covered wait area that people were lining up in. Once in, we started on the trail into the dark woods. There were a few torches, but for the most part it was pretty dark. Your eyes will adjust just enough so you can see shapes and shadows which can be extremely unnerving when you see a dark shape coming at you! Although the Zombie Shoot gets all the glory, this was my favorite part of the night. It is definitely a home-made 'haunted woods' but it was done well and the actors were incredible. I was jumping and laughing the entire time!

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So many mixed feelings about this haunt! Shockwave Haunts is located in rural Whitewater, which when you get there seems like a world away from the college town I think of as Whitewater. Shockwave is comprised of 4 haunts, all of which have their own theme. We arrived at Shockwave around 10, let me just say that parking is a nightmare there! We entered the lot, and waited for two cars to figure out how to exit a lot, this took literally 5 minutes or so. They were SUPER confused that we were waiting at the entrance for them to move so we could park in one of their spots. The lot is more of a grass/gravel area with no distinct spots, so you can imagine our displeasure when were were leaving and we had to maneuver our car because the person who parked next to us decided he was going to park at the opposite angle as us and leave his rear end out far enough that if we backed straight up we would have hit his car... annoying!

ANYWAYS, we walked up and saw a sign which read concessions and restrooms, but that's the only sign we saw. Where do we buy tickets??? No clue! We went into the building with the restrooms, it's a big building with Christmas trees decked out with orange lights, and a bar/Halloween costume store. In here you can purchase an Amy Winehouse wig and a Captain & Coke if you so wish. They actually had a pretty good selection at the bar, and if I weren't on official Haunted Wisconsin business I might have indulged and let you know how the service was! But still no ticket sales. We left this building and walked over to a fire pit and a young woman asked if we knew where we were going. Finally someone who wanted to help us! She pointed us in the direction of the ticketing area, which was absolutely not labeled, and not common sense by any means. We bought our tickets, $20 for all of haunts and headed back to the helpful woman, as it still wasn't clear where to go. She took us to our first haunt, which was back in the building with the restrooms, and located through a door which was not labeled, but instead guarded by a young lady sitting at a desk. This was called St. Leah's Last Rights Nursing Home, or "Comedy" so the map says (which we found affixed to a wall).

St. Leah's
The theme of St. Leah's was old super heroes, and this was their nursing home. Was it funny? Sure, but here's the deal, I'm anything but the "I'm appalled guy" but this was a little much. Their blue humor seemed to be shocking simply for the sake of shock value. It seemed like a "we can swear in here and we are going to do it to be edgy" thing, and it got old real fast. Each room of this section had a super hero that was of a certain age, or a nursing home employee, most notably Nurse Double D... Yup, she's exactly what you'd think she is. At a certain point I found myself thinking "I get it, you are edgy" but it just kept going. This section definitely isn't for kids. Hopefully they have enough control to not use that humor if kids come through. We were in and out of this area in about 10 minutes.

Blood Manor
The next haunt was called Blood Manor, and was a pretty cool haunt. But before we can get to the cool haunt I must tell you, this was the MOST DISORGANIZED line I've experienced in my 7 years of reviewing! We walked up to the "line" which was a herd of people with no rhyme or reason to what was going on. The line was made up of what I'm guessing was high school kids and college freshmen, and this proved to be frustrating because friends would find friends towards the front and start chatting, which would make them part of the line. We were at the end of the line for a good portion because it seemed like everyone knew each other and cuts were encouraged. We were behind two high school girls that were trying very hard to be "mature" and the one was assuring the other to just swear because her mother wasn't around, and it wasn't like she cared anyways! Oh kids! The herd lead into a set of stairs that eventually lead to the haunt. You don't know living until you've seen groups of teens apparently under a black light for the first time ever! Oh the amazement!

Blood Manor is a dark maze; that's the gist of it. It has actors jumping out, and some sets. One set we went through had an actor who broke character and told us that around the corner there were some teen girls and he wanted to know if they could join in behind us because they were scared. We met up with them, and as you could guess, it was the aforementioned swearing teens. It was fun listening to them scream and get scared, but by this point the one teen had taken her friend's advice and was all about shouting out curse words. Super annoying, but it was fine. This haunt took about 7 minutes.

Nightmare at the Carnival
Next we decided to check out a section called Nightmare at the Carnival, yep, a carnival themed haunt. This is the hot ticket this year, clowns! We didn't actually know where this haunt was at first as there was no line waiting to get in, and we needed an employee there to knock for us apparently? Well, we found it because we saw a couple girls headed that way, and an employee who let them in. We hustled over there because like I said, no line! We got into it and who would have known, the girls we saw walking were the high school girls from before. They decided to join us again. There wasn't much difference between this and the last section, aside from this one having clowns. Dark mazes bookended by clowns jumping out at you. I enjoyed this area, but it was short, maybe 7 minutes total. Again the girls were pushing and swearing, but I made sure I took my time, if for nothing else to make their horror last longer!

Mystery Haunt
Lastly we checked out the final haunt, which was simply titled Mystery Haunt. No teenage girls would be joining us for this haunt, but we did have a group that was positively HAMMERED behind us. This is the price you pay for having a bar at your attraction (well, I hope they got drunk there, if they drove there, yikes!). This haunt was very unique, as it was 95% crawling. I loved this concept, but it was very short. It was just dark, no jump scares except one point which was awesome, but I'll keep that to myself as I don't want to ruin it for anyone. I'll just say that it was very surprising! Like I said, this area was very short, and as we exited I questioned whether we had taken an emergency exit on accident because it seemed like it should have lasted longer! In all this area was no more than 5 minutes. Maybe the thought was that some people couldn't handle crawling that long, but I wanted more!!!

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First year hiccups aside, Terror at the Fair impresses! Being a southeastern Wisconsin guy I was psyched to see that new for this year, the Kenosha County Fairgrounds was putting on Terror at the Fair. The descriptions intrigued me, so I had to review this one. Aside from a few very fixable issues, this haunt has extreme staying power!

We arrived at at Terror just after 7:00, well when I say arrived I mean after we drove down a road that lead us to some locked gates (thanks Apple maps!), turned around, took a left, drove past the entrance (which was a barely lit up sign and a $9.99 strobe light above said sign that I only noticed when we actually entered the grounds... it was tiny!), turned around and finally entered the fairgrounds. The first thing I noticed was there were maybe 15 cars in the lot. Sweet, no need to pay the extra $5 for the fast pass, this should take no time at all! Boy was I wrong! We purchased our tickets and proceeded to the line area, a stable I think, which was hazed with fog and music courtesy of a DJ! He was playing season appropriate tunes, this was a nice touch. The waiting area had a few clowns that terrorized those waiting in line, a timely treat as we all know clowns are the it thing (based on the news at least!). The were entertaining to say the least, and they knew EXACTLY who to mess with!

Alright, here we are, it's been 10 minutes, the line hasn't moved yet. At least there was line entertainment to keep up from falling asleep! Another 15 minutes goes by, OOOH! Two people enter! alright, we're in business! 10-15 minutes more, two more people enter. Does this open at 8 and they are just letting a few people go through as a test run? Nope, the website says 7, what's going on? We wait probably another 15 minutes and I decide to step out of line and see if we can pay the difference and trade our tickets in for fast passes (I have another haunt to get to, and at this rate I wont even get into the haunt until after 10!). On my walk I genuinely enjoyed the look of confusion on the actors faces as they asked me where I was going. I replied that it was already too scary, and they were confused by this! If they only knew how much it took to actually "scare" me! The ladies at the ticket booth were more than happy to exchange our tickets, and we were on our way to the front of the line! I can see now why it was taking so long, as we arrived to the fast pass area there was a couple that they were letting in, and then they let us stand at the entrance. If you buy a fast pass they aren't letting ANYONE in until you've entered! That line was never going to move if people kept shelling out the extra 5 bucks. I get the idea, you pay the extra and you get the perks, but you gotta let some general admission folks in between fast passers or that line is never going down. But I digress, we waited for another 7 minutes or so, being entertained by the lady at the door with her demon baby that she told me was an "it" after I asked the sex of her beautiful child, and one of the clowns that was legitimately making us laugh out loud! Finally we were able to enter the haunt.

This haunt was super surprising in that they had some of the best actors I have experienced in my tenure as a Review Crew member! Little to no animatronics, which is a good and a bad thing because I truly like them when used sparingly, but they relied on genuine human interaction to get you jumping, and they excelled at that! The sets were pretty good, and they had a good mix of sets and darkness. A really well put together haunt. I don't mean to keep bringing it back to the actors, but I was taken back at the commitment and the willingness to put caution to the wind so they could make the show memorable for the visitors. When I say caution to the wind I mean each and every one of them is going to have the WORST sore throats in the morning! I've never been screamed at quite like these actors screamed at us! It was jarring to say the least, and to the 3 "little girls" that were in that haunt, kudos to you! Funny and terrifying at the same time! The haunt revisits a theme that was pretty popular 5-6 years ago, and that is 3D. The use of glasses and and 3D paint is a fun effect, and the second section is full of this. It was nice to see this again, as I enjoyed it quite a bit years ago when it seemed like every haunt was doing this.

The only con I can say the actual haunt has is that it is WAY too short! We were in and out in less than 15 minutes, and I'm a slow mover in these things, I like to take it all in. The price and potential wait just doesn't jive with the time spent in the haunt. The space is limited, and I really hope they expand on it in the future.

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