Frightmare!

Yep. That's the one. I batted my eyes at Chad and asked nicely if he would take me to Frightmare this year, and he seemed pretty keen on the idea, so last night we (and a good friend, Aaron) all jetted off to see what all the fuss was about.

It waaaasssss..... "Frightmare!"

I'll be perfectly honest and say that I put that '!' on the end of the title with no small sense of sarcasm, tho it holds an appropriate air of tacky, worn-out desperation, kind of like the title is trying just a little too hard to be taken excitedly.
Now, I won't be a brat and say I didn't have a good time. Because I did. My favorite was actually 'The Black Hole'  which was an optical illusion. I really fell over and had to grab the dang hand rail because I thought I would topple right over the edge. I felt like I was training to fight Buggers or something.
'Ricker's Island' was thematically solid, and while there were plenty of jump-scares (not a challenge to scare me that way, friends) there wasn't anything memorably spooky- just a pile of guts over here, and a pile of guts over there sort of thing. It wasn't bad. Except for the part where Aaron about took a guys head off when the guy ran at him full speed firing a fake gun. Military.
Then we all sat down and Aaron and Chad forced a slice of pizza down my throat, and we all drank a ton of Mountain Dew and made sarcastic remarks about the 'Bill Pierce Courtesy Honda' sign plastered on the side of Ricker's Island.
Then off to the Black Hole, which as I said, was marvelous, and then to 'Clown Town', which was the least anticipated event for me. I am not a fan of clowns, unless they are the silly kind at the circus.
People always say, "Well, look at that clown? Isn't he scary?"
Yes, well, of course he's scary. Anything is scary when it's got fangs, or a butcher knife in it's head or in it's hand.
But Clown Town was pretty well done. They did some cool tricks with the lighting and 3-D glasses and it was well put together and had some un-anticipated jumps, which was refreshing. The thing I really liked was that many of the the optical illusions were original and memorable, two things that Ricker's Island really needed.
Then came the totally un-original Maze, which I was really looking forward to but did not deliver and probably took a grand total of a half hour to set up. And it had an un-godly long line.
The whole time I couldn't help but think how the whole operation had such potential, but just achieved, really, about half of it. You have about six million teenagers running around with cash-in-hand from thier parents who are happy to be rid of them for the evening. There was only one!!! food place. I'm sure they like the lack of competition, but a popcorn stand and a hot dog stand would have turned a tidy profit that night, I promise. And maybe a hot-cocoa place, it was getting a bit chilly.
And WTF is with this stupid trend of guts guts guts everywhere guts. Honestly. Three 'haunted' events and not a single ghost. Or vampire. Or witch or gypsy or werewolf or mummy or creature from the freaking black lagoon. There were a few zombie-types, so, props for that. But, really? I get it that the aformentioned creatures aren't SCARY to teenagers, but really, neither are piles of guts everywhere. And piles of guts are way lazy.
I would have added a few more tents. They needed a fortune-teller for all the girls to ask if the pimpley-faced boy their crushing on is thier true love, and an up-and-coming or a down-on-his-luck magician doing some tricks to secretly amaze the adolecents, despite thier cries of "LAME! YOU SUCK BALLS!" and other useful criticisms.
And they also needed an 18+ tent to attract the generally deeper pockets of that crowd. The burlesque-y artsy crowd would relish the chance to throw a Halloween show, and I am of the opinion that any event is made better by dancing girls, of verying genres.
So that's my opinion of Frightmare!
Thanks for taking me, Chad my lover. Mwah.