Dan Harkless
Last modified: October 3, 2008
A movie tie-in maze following in the successful footsteps of The Grudge 2. However, unlike with that movie, which opened 2006-10-13, Beowulf didn't open until 2007-11-16, after the Haunt was over. Therefore, while I suppose it may have been an effective marketing tool, getting some Haunt-goers to see the film who would not have otherwise, I definitely prefer having the ability to enjoy entering the fantasy world of a film that I've seen (yes, I read the poem in high school, but that's not the same thing). Even The Grudge 2 wasn't ideal in this respect, since the first time I visited the Haunt that year the movie had not yet opened -- but at least there the iconography had been established by the previous U.S. and Japanese films in the series.
The maze itself was quite enjoyable, although perhaps not much to write home about. It did a pretty good job of recreating the world of the movie, although as I've said, barring anyone who'd been lucky enough to see a sneak preview or something, nobody going through the maze was able to enjoy that aspect.
The coolest thing in the maze, of course, was the animatronic Grendel puppet. On my first trip through the maze, during which I did not film, there were some great instances of Grendel grabbing at people. My video is edited together from visits I made to the maze on 10-25 and 10-28, and unfortunately only on 10-25 did Grendel's operators make even half-hearted attempts to grab at people while I was going through.
Another thing that I was unfortunately not able to capture on video was that there was a second version of Grendel (incongruously, just after and within sight of the one you see here). The second version was a tall walkaround character, who would also grab (similar to the wraiths at end of Lore of the Vampire). There is actually a quick glimpse of him in this video (as a I pan to the right after passing the first Grendel), but it's very brief, mostly out-of-focus, and only a portion of him was lit by the IR LED in my Sony camcorder. I would have tried a bit harder to catch him, but there was a maze attendant right there and I was afraid that due to this being a movie tie-in maze they were going to ask me to stop filming. On my 10-28 visit the character was again lurking in that dark area (although without anyone inside, it seemed to me), and that time my NightShot light wouldn't penetrate the darkness at all. (In the past I'd researched getting an add-on IR light to deal with the poor illuminating capability and obvious rectangular hot spot of the built-in NightShot light but had found out that while the lights I was considering were brighter, they had the same hot spot problem. However, for 2008, I have a couple of leads on lights that should kill both of those birds.)
Other stand-out elements of the maze were the music (which I assume was taken from the film -- not sure), the room with the silhouette and captivating voice of Angelina Jolie as the demonic mother of Grendel, the bungee scarer who jumps down and disembowels a warrior (on my 10-25 visit they didn't have this elaborate setup -- merely a lone dude on the bungee who would just jump down at you), and the awesome animatronic dragon at the end (which is not just a re-used prop from an older attraction as I thought at the time -- the sculpt is actually a pretty good match for the dragon in the film), with its impressive smoke-blast breath.
As good as those elements were, though, the other elements of the maze, such as the generic skeletal warrior dudes (who don't really have anything to do with Beowulf), were fairly "meh".
Unlike The Grudge 2, which due to its popularity (I assume it wasn't originally the plan) managed to last another season past the movie's theatrical and subsequent DVD release, the Beowulf Labyrinth Into Darkness was a single-year affair.
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Dan Harkless
Last modified: October 3, 2008
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