Dan Harkless
Last modified: February 16, 2010
The first official movie tie-in maze at Knott's Scary Farm, as far as I'm aware, and a fantastic initial effort in this arena. Some pretty amazing mechanical effects, good sculpts and set design, nice recreations of memorable scenes and moments from the films, very good use of sound effects and the soundtrack from The Grudge, and some excellent casting and acting.
As to that last point, unfortunately on this trip through the maze I didn't catch some of the cooler actions by the Kayako girls. The first time I went through the maze I wasn't filming, so I could enjoy it fully, and cool things the girls did that time included "the Kayako walk" (as director Takashi Shimizu referred to it in the translated commentary for the first U.S. film -- "the Kayako crawl" might be more apt) along the ground, with the addition of hands contortionistically turned backwards; the creepy Kayako broken-neck head jerks; and balancing on the thin ledges of the walls in the darkroom scene.
You might think that it'd be jarring to have so many different girls playing Kayako, but they did an excellent job getting very physically similar girls and then disguising their differences with the makeup. Well, that one guy in the last room doing Kayako was a little jarring. Wonder if he was a replacement after attrition during the season lost them too many girls. That Kayako in the final hallway before the exit looked a little large as well.
A few things that you either can't see or can't see well in my video that I wanted to mention as being nice touches are the maze entrance archway of black hair and heads of Grudge victims (the icon for this page on the parent page is a close-up photo of one of the heads), the gasoline cans at the foot of the stairs (a movie tie-in), Toshio (the creepy little ghost boy) peering out at you through the balustrade in that room, the camouflaged monster covered with black hair in the hairy room just before the eyeball room, and the blood-colored fluid bubbling in the photo development tray in the darkroom. You can catch a few of the elements not seen in my video in UltimateHaunt.com's pictorial tribute to the maze.
I was sad contemplating that this great maze would probably not return after 2006, since it was tied in so closely with the theatrical release of The Grudge 2, and the DVD is already out, but per ThemeParkAdventure.com, it actually will be returning. Very cool -- IMHO, this is easily one of Knott's best mazes ever.
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Dan Harkless
Last modified: February 16, 2010
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