Okay so this is another basic bitch trip report – feels like I’m the last person on here to go ride Untamed! I’ve been to these parks before, and the weather wasn’t spectacular this weekend, so I’m afraid this won’t be quite as picture heavy as I normally manage, but had a good trip liked up with @Ben, Sam and a few others though so hopefully this’ll be engaging enough to scroll through.
Day 1 – Movie Park Germany
Day started with a disgusting (and I mean dis-gus-ting) departure from Bristol. Flight was grotesquely early in the morning, staff at the airport were foul, and they made us walk across the tarmac to the plane in a miniature typhoon. Awful.
In Schiphol soon enough, and after a little bit of car faff we were on our way in our enormous Outlander PHEV. Lovely stuff.
Last time we’d been to Movie Park we’d been spited by Star Trek (basically just Germans being uncharacteristically lazy), so that was first order of business. On the way, stopped for a quick go on Van Helsing as it was a walk on. This one is great, despite some hilariously vicious corners in the dark.
I do like how Star Trek is framed at the park entrance, although it’s barely visible from most of the rest of the park.
Good theming of the outside of Van Helsing.
Not so much for Star Trek – very cheap feeling, sadly.
Star Trek was alright, in the end. Mack launches aren’t ever up to much, but the reverse spike was good and the ride had some halfway decent forces in places. The airtime out of the first inversion and high-speed corner thing being the highlights. We rode towards the back, and I’m sorry to say that it had an awful vibrate-y rattle to it – definitely not what I’d expect from a Mack. We all agreed that whilst it’s a good ride, it’s not really substantial enough to be the park’s flagship coaster – they are in dire need of something just a little more powerful.
With that done, it was time to wrap up a few more of the creds for the others who hadn’t done them – thankfully not goons though (yet!) so no need to ride everything. Took a quick spin on Bandit which was just as stupid as before – in other words bouncy, rough and fun! Ben took Ryan on the SLC for some insane reason, but the more sensible of us decided to sit that one out.
One of the least bouncy drops.
I’m not trusting those smiles...
We wandered around for bit, grabbed a bite to eat, met spooky SpongeBob and then headed to Area 51.
@Ben.
Area 51’s revamped platform.
Admittedly when I rode Area 51 as Bermuda Triangle back in 2017 it didn’t have much of an effect on me. The recent retheme didn’t really ring any major bells, other than that the whole thing feels a bit more polished around the edges. Frankly, though, most of the enjoyment of this ride comes from the people you ride it with – and with some mildly more intense splattering that we were expecting there was plenty of drama from the group. A trip to the drying booth was in order, so I used the opportunity to make the most of Area 51’s placement to get some shots of Star Trek. Probably the best location for getting photos this – which is odd as it’s very tucked away.
Even then, the angles aren’t amazing.
Almost a reverse-flying-snake-dive… almost.
The final corkscrew is rather good.
It was just about time for all the Halloween stuff to start, so we made our way to the main stage for the kick-off party. Started with a lot of hype and build-up (which ran for quite a while longer than it felt like it would, to be honest), before all of the actors who’d be mingling around the park headed out on this really fab ‘release’ into the park. Cool way to kick the evening off, I have to admit.
Disco tent.
Some dancing.
Only got one shot of them coming out – camera in the wrong mode (doh!) so couldn’t get the rest sharp. You get the idea though. Lots of impressive make-up - which apparently the performers all do themselves!
We spent the rest of the evening trying out all of the mazes. I won’t go into loads of detail, but I’ll give a brief summary of each one. Can’t really remember the order in which we did them either, so I’ll just do them alphabetically.
Campout: This was possibly the weakest of the attractions. The setting is interesting out in the woods, but there isn’t much more going for it. The scares were okay, but the use of whistles was a bit of an immersion breaker.
Circus of Freaks: Another one I didn’t particularly like. I appreciated the actor costumes, they were great and you had plenty of time to look at them, but I thought the scares were a bit weak (read: non-existent).
Hostel: This maze had a good theme and was well executed, particularly the ending escape/chaos. Had a good use of senses too, balancing light and dark, smells, noise and even water!
Insidious: The most notable thing about this was the size of some of the sets. The large open rooms made for a good tense attraction with us all being thrown by not even knowing the direction we were meant to walk in, let alone where the actors were likely to be. I don’t know the stories that well (I think I’ve only seen one of the movies), but was a good standalone attraction.
Project Ningyo: The new-for-2019 maze was a notable cut above the rest. The start in particular, with a great set with actors not scaring you (lab workers going about their business, kinda thing). Once the chaos ensues there are a few good sections and scares, but also a few slightly odd bits that only made sense to us as we’d had the tour with the designers beforehand!
Slaughterhouse: This was at the park when we visited a few years back, but still holds up as one of the better ones. The ending is particularly good with a huge fog-filled room for you to navigate through. By the end of the night, the fog had started to permeate through the whole maze – they were obviously getting their money’s worth from the smoke machine!
Walking Dead Breakout: This is their permanent attraction open year round, and it’s fair to say it’s got the most impressive sets – probably because they’re authorised (and paid for in part) by AMC. Scares this time, however, were few and far between. It felt like there were only half the number of actors there should have been – shame really…
Wrong Turn: This might have been my favourite idea. If you don’t know, and to avoid giving too much away, they turn the rapids trough into a horror maze which you navigate with your own interactive lamplight. Very cool concept. It wasn’t massively good from a scare perspective, but it was a unique experience.
General Scare Zones: This was where Movie Park Germany really excelled. They had a great variety of actors (although they must have had a good discount of baseball bats this season) walking around, creeping up on people, startling people, all the usual stuff. Their make-up and costume work was really impressive.
I’ll chuck some general pictures up now.
The entrance to the main scare zone.
The ‘main street’ area of Movie Park Germany.
Here the actors wait at the entrance to the scare zone.
Some of the areas were quite nicely decked up in Halloween theming too.
At this point it was time to head to the final closing show. Highlight was the fire, of course, but the whole thing was reasonably impressive. We’d been told that they had to stop the fireworks temporarily as the neighbours has kicked up a bit of a stink. The park were still trying to negotiate at the time of our visit.
Fire and creds isn’t a bad shout.
And lasers too, I suppose.
And that was that. Joined a pretty monster queue to get out of the car park, but once we’d filtered out of the bottleneck car park exit it was a smooth trip to our hotel. By the time we got in, we’d been on the go for about 20 hours, so we hit the sack for a much needed rest.
Movie Park Germany’s Halloween event was pretty good, really. With eight mazes and some impressive scare zones, the whole park felt like they’d done a good job of pulling everything together. The park itself is a bit naff – nothing inherently wrong, but nothing inherently good either. Don’t expect I’ll go back for a number of years now…
Next up is Toverland and all of the fun that entails.
Day 1 – Movie Park Germany
Day started with a disgusting (and I mean dis-gus-ting) departure from Bristol. Flight was grotesquely early in the morning, staff at the airport were foul, and they made us walk across the tarmac to the plane in a miniature typhoon. Awful.
In Schiphol soon enough, and after a little bit of car faff we were on our way in our enormous Outlander PHEV. Lovely stuff.
Last time we’d been to Movie Park we’d been spited by Star Trek (basically just Germans being uncharacteristically lazy), so that was first order of business. On the way, stopped for a quick go on Van Helsing as it was a walk on. This one is great, despite some hilariously vicious corners in the dark.
I do like how Star Trek is framed at the park entrance, although it’s barely visible from most of the rest of the park.
Good theming of the outside of Van Helsing.
Not so much for Star Trek – very cheap feeling, sadly.
Star Trek was alright, in the end. Mack launches aren’t ever up to much, but the reverse spike was good and the ride had some halfway decent forces in places. The airtime out of the first inversion and high-speed corner thing being the highlights. We rode towards the back, and I’m sorry to say that it had an awful vibrate-y rattle to it – definitely not what I’d expect from a Mack. We all agreed that whilst it’s a good ride, it’s not really substantial enough to be the park’s flagship coaster – they are in dire need of something just a little more powerful.
With that done, it was time to wrap up a few more of the creds for the others who hadn’t done them – thankfully not goons though (yet!) so no need to ride everything. Took a quick spin on Bandit which was just as stupid as before – in other words bouncy, rough and fun! Ben took Ryan on the SLC for some insane reason, but the more sensible of us decided to sit that one out.
One of the least bouncy drops.
I’m not trusting those smiles...
We wandered around for bit, grabbed a bite to eat, met spooky SpongeBob and then headed to Area 51.
@Ben.
Area 51’s revamped platform.
Admittedly when I rode Area 51 as Bermuda Triangle back in 2017 it didn’t have much of an effect on me. The recent retheme didn’t really ring any major bells, other than that the whole thing feels a bit more polished around the edges. Frankly, though, most of the enjoyment of this ride comes from the people you ride it with – and with some mildly more intense splattering that we were expecting there was plenty of drama from the group. A trip to the drying booth was in order, so I used the opportunity to make the most of Area 51’s placement to get some shots of Star Trek. Probably the best location for getting photos this – which is odd as it’s very tucked away.
Even then, the angles aren’t amazing.
Almost a reverse-flying-snake-dive… almost.
The final corkscrew is rather good.
It was just about time for all the Halloween stuff to start, so we made our way to the main stage for the kick-off party. Started with a lot of hype and build-up (which ran for quite a while longer than it felt like it would, to be honest), before all of the actors who’d be mingling around the park headed out on this really fab ‘release’ into the park. Cool way to kick the evening off, I have to admit.
Disco tent.
Some dancing.
Only got one shot of them coming out – camera in the wrong mode (doh!) so couldn’t get the rest sharp. You get the idea though. Lots of impressive make-up - which apparently the performers all do themselves!
We spent the rest of the evening trying out all of the mazes. I won’t go into loads of detail, but I’ll give a brief summary of each one. Can’t really remember the order in which we did them either, so I’ll just do them alphabetically.
Campout: This was possibly the weakest of the attractions. The setting is interesting out in the woods, but there isn’t much more going for it. The scares were okay, but the use of whistles was a bit of an immersion breaker.
Circus of Freaks: Another one I didn’t particularly like. I appreciated the actor costumes, they were great and you had plenty of time to look at them, but I thought the scares were a bit weak (read: non-existent).
Hostel: This maze had a good theme and was well executed, particularly the ending escape/chaos. Had a good use of senses too, balancing light and dark, smells, noise and even water!
Insidious: The most notable thing about this was the size of some of the sets. The large open rooms made for a good tense attraction with us all being thrown by not even knowing the direction we were meant to walk in, let alone where the actors were likely to be. I don’t know the stories that well (I think I’ve only seen one of the movies), but was a good standalone attraction.
Project Ningyo: The new-for-2019 maze was a notable cut above the rest. The start in particular, with a great set with actors not scaring you (lab workers going about their business, kinda thing). Once the chaos ensues there are a few good sections and scares, but also a few slightly odd bits that only made sense to us as we’d had the tour with the designers beforehand!
Slaughterhouse: This was at the park when we visited a few years back, but still holds up as one of the better ones. The ending is particularly good with a huge fog-filled room for you to navigate through. By the end of the night, the fog had started to permeate through the whole maze – they were obviously getting their money’s worth from the smoke machine!
Walking Dead Breakout: This is their permanent attraction open year round, and it’s fair to say it’s got the most impressive sets – probably because they’re authorised (and paid for in part) by AMC. Scares this time, however, were few and far between. It felt like there were only half the number of actors there should have been – shame really…
Wrong Turn: This might have been my favourite idea. If you don’t know, and to avoid giving too much away, they turn the rapids trough into a horror maze which you navigate with your own interactive lamplight. Very cool concept. It wasn’t massively good from a scare perspective, but it was a unique experience.
General Scare Zones: This was where Movie Park Germany really excelled. They had a great variety of actors (although they must have had a good discount of baseball bats this season) walking around, creeping up on people, startling people, all the usual stuff. Their make-up and costume work was really impressive.
I’ll chuck some general pictures up now.
The entrance to the main scare zone.
The ‘main street’ area of Movie Park Germany.
Here the actors wait at the entrance to the scare zone.
Some of the areas were quite nicely decked up in Halloween theming too.
At this point it was time to head to the final closing show. Highlight was the fire, of course, but the whole thing was reasonably impressive. We’d been told that they had to stop the fireworks temporarily as the neighbours has kicked up a bit of a stink. The park were still trying to negotiate at the time of our visit.
Fire and creds isn’t a bad shout.
And lasers too, I suppose.
And that was that. Joined a pretty monster queue to get out of the car park, but once we’d filtered out of the bottleneck car park exit it was a smooth trip to our hotel. By the time we got in, we’d been on the go for about 20 hours, so we hit the sack for a much needed rest.
Movie Park Germany’s Halloween event was pretty good, really. With eight mazes and some impressive scare zones, the whole park felt like they’d done a good job of pulling everything together. The park itself is a bit naff – nothing inherently wrong, but nothing inherently good either. Don’t expect I’ll go back for a number of years now…
Next up is Toverland and all of the fun that entails.
