Stuff: Things are really dead in San Antonio.

So, if visiting the Alamo seems overly reverent, Ripley's Haunted Adventure's front door is across the plaza. While the big budget, ever-open haunted house attraction goes for the regional appeal by referencing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I regret that they didn't capitalize on the specific location and have the angry corpses of Mexican soldiers attempting to eat us tourists. Or a zombie Bowie coming at our skulls with his famed knife. Seems like a wasted opportunity.

Movies: Do you wanna play house?

Filmmakers seem to hate carnies.

Admittedly, real carnival folk are an odd breed. The mobile life, though much romanticized, basically puts you outside of the common experience of most of the population. Like any subculture, there's the colorful slang, notable in this case for its astounding number of terms related to communicating the distinctions and trouble between carnival-goers and the ever changing cast of locals they encounter (carnival relativity: to a carny, the "locals" appear transient). Perhaps most importantly, so much of the entertainment carnivals provide is based on humbug, a tricky and delicate unacknowledged social contract that promotes certain level of well-meant deceit between the parties involved. It's a suspension the normal rules used to evaluate social exchanges and it can turn really bitter, really fast.

No doubt there are, among their numbers, con men and petty criminals. Though this could be said of any professional group – from cops to bankers – and it has to be admitted that, comparatively, even the most legally dubious carny does comparatively little damage when measured against, say, a crooked hedge fund manager or a corrupt politician.

Mostly though, the carny folk I've met funny, kind, intelligent folks. Witty too. For example, I once met a performer who billed himself as Eek the Geek, the Freak with Space on His Face. The latter part of his lengthy moniker referred to an elaborate astronomically-themed tattoo that covered his entire head. I met him after catching his act at Coney Island. His act included, if I recall, of driving nails into his nose, snapping his tongue in a mousetrap, and placing live scorpions in his mouth. After the show, we struck up a conversation and I offered to buy him a hot dog from Nathan's. "No thanks," he said. "I don't put that shit in my body."

I've met college-educated sword-swallowers and know a young woman who gave up a fairly promising career in publishing to become a fire-eater. I've been lucky enough to cross paths with Todd Robbins, head of Coney's sideshow school. Besides being able to eat shards of glass, Robbins in a gentleman and a scholar. He presided over a friend's wedding several years ago. There's also Dick Zigun, the "Mayor of Coney Island." Zigun's life – sideshow performer, oddity collector, married to a genuine Africa princess – would pass any carny stink test. Yet Zigun's also politically-engaged, knowledgeable and passionate about urban development and social issues, and one of the key figures in the movement to develop Coney in a way that would preserve something of its wild and unruly character.

Despite what one thinks would be a certain affinity, Hollywood's carnies are almost always nasty bits of business. With the homicidal somnambulist of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and several variants of Cheney's murderous carny crooks (two versions of the The Unholy Three, The Unknown), filmmakers set the tone early. Sure, there have been some notable exceptions: The Man Who Laughs lets the straight world play the villain for a bit and the titular characters of Freaks are intended to be as sympathetic as they are scary. But mostly, carnivals are a demonic places full of toothless hicks and sly dealers, filthy people who want only to travel from place to place eating souls or similarly discomforting the locals.

The 1981 fright flick The Funhouse is part of this long cinematic tradition. The flick starts with a ice-breaker "kill" that is all the evidence one needs that the slasher formula had already congealed into a predictable orthodoxy by '81. The opening scene, which says "hey, it's a slasher flick" by simultaneously riffing off Halloween and Psycho, starts with a pov shot of a masked killer getting a knife and making his way into the bathroom of a suburban home. In said bathroom, there's some perfunctory T&A, then the as yet unidentified slasher opens the shower curtain and plunges his knife repeatedly at the naked girl. If you ended the flick right there, you would have pretty made yourself a fully functional slasher movie. In fact, you'd have made one of the better slashers as your flick would have been mercifully short and completely devoid of dialogue.

But The Funhouse continues.

The would be vic screams, fights back, and grabs the attackers knife hand at the wrist. The girl is overpowered and the knife slowly descends down towards "Not Rated" territory. Then, before the beaver shot, the knife plunges and bends harmlessly against the girl's tummy. It's a fake. It's a prank by her younger brother, a little scoundrel of a boy who understands that sometimes, for the best pranks, you need to stalk you naked old sister in the bathroom. Sure, it's a little pervy. But later, in therapy, you'll look back on all the time you spent planning and executing you plan to surprise your sister in the shower and you'll just laugh and laugh.

Sadly, sis doesn't take the long-term view of this and chases little brother to his room. And tells him that someday she'll prank him so had that it will scar him for life.

So ends the flicks weirdly Fruedian intro and on we move to the main event. Freshly showered, the girl – virgin good-girl Amy – joins up with hunky boyfriend Buzz, semi-slutty (meaning she's had, dare I say it, sex!) Liz, and Liz's nerdy college-boy man pet Richie.

They go to a traveling carnival and spend a good 50 minutes or so roaming around, enjoying toke breaks, bumping into various carnies (several of who seem to be crazy homeless people), or otherwise dragging everything out. There make important stops for a ominous palm reading, an extended bathroom break for the ladies to discuss the futility of not giving it up, and a few shots of a two-headed cow. For a little dramatic gravity, there are several scenes in which ominous music kicks in and Amy seems to get hypnotized by some detail of the carnival. It is meant to imply that she's seeing sinister portents, but the effect is that she just seems easily confused by motion and bright lights.

As the teen quartet ever-so-slowly makes their way to killy time. We see that Amy's little bro has snuck out, determined to follow his sister to the carnival. Presumably to watch Amy get heavy-petted by Buzz or something. His trip the carnival is considerably more interesting than anything that is going on at the carnival. He nearly gets chomped by guard dogs and crosses paths with a gun-totting motorist of the "Hey little boy, want a ride variety."

As we wait for little brother to arrive, Nerdelmeister comes up with the funnest sounding idea ever! The quartet should spend the night in the carnival funhouse. As a slightly rundown spookshow dark ride is obviously the most clean, comfortable, and sensual place one could chose to lose one's cherry, Amy agrees. Buzz knows that a gentleman makes a girl's first time special, so he opts for the funhouse over the back seat of his Dodge Charger. Liz, because she's had sex before, will pretty much rut anywhere. To the funhouse gang!

At this point the little bro subplot links up to main story. Little bro watches the gang enter the house, posing a normal riders. But, unable to see that they ditch before the ride is over, he doesn't see them come out. He'll spend most of the next 30 minutes or so cautiously eyeing the funhouse. Hey, it's a horror movie, not an action flick. What do you want?

Inside, the teen quartet finds what appears to be the "trippy gnome village" section of the funhouse ride and starts to grope and thrust. In le mode de les années 80, the couples don't find separate, private areas to have sex in. Instead they just start at it about 20 feet away from one another. Hey, we're all friends here, right? Fortunately, the much delayed carnage begins when their romantic interlude is interrupted by a noise beneath them, coming up from the office of the funhouse. Peering through the slat of the floor, the gang witnesses the hulking, masked assistant of the funhouse ride murder the carny fortune-teller in a sex-for-cash transaction that goes awry. The assistant is unmasked as an albino mutant and his pops, the funhouse barker (who looks suspiciously like all the barkers in the carnival), arrives to figure out what to do with the dead fortune teller. Then, happily, Dorkus McNerdy accidentally drops his cigarette lighter through the slats and the chasing and killing begins in earnest.

(And what happens to the little bro? He finally approaches the house, gets scared by the mutant, and then either gets saved or captured and sexually molested by one of the other barkers, depending on how you read the scene. His parents come to pick him up, but he won't talk – either because he thinks his sister hates or because he mistaken believes his molestation was part of her revenge for the prank, again depending on how you read the scene - and fails to explain that sis entered and never left the funhouse. All of this leads to a nicely frustrating scene in which Amy tries desperately, but futilely to signal her parents to free her.)

What follows is an engaging, but fairly standard by-the-numbers stalk-the-teens affair. The order of deaths is the identity of the final girl is obvious from the beginning of the flick, so all that remains is execution. It's worth noting, however, that the proceedings are, by slash standards, relatively bloodless. With the exception of an extended "axe in the head" scene – the victim of which is already dead when it happens – most of the killing is done just off screen and with a minimum of gore. For the look of the flick, Hooper takes cues from the garish lights and colors of the midway. In some ways, The Funhouse seems like practice for the color drenched carnivalesque look Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2. After the sun-bleach minimalist vérité of Chain Saw, it's as if Hooper started working on ostentatiously artificial style, not unlike self-conscious and mannered style of Italian shock vendors. Only, being slightly down home, Hooper keeps it simple and rough about the edges. It's a garage rock to Italy's opera.

Still, it all seems like a dry run, with the emphasis on "dry."

With talent to burn behind the screen – director Tobe Hooper was just two flicks away from his seminal Chain Saw – the real surprise of Funhouse is how bush league the flick feels. The film feels stilted: uneasy with the confinement of the slasher formula, but unsure or unwilling to go in another direction. Again and again, the best work in this flick comes in the form of asides, most of which are left tantalizing underused or frustratingly unfulfilled. The little brothers fate, for example, or the hints that the fortune teller has supernatural powers or that the carnival might be one big family of crazies; all of these feel like elements of the story the filmmakers cared more about than the stalk-and-slay mechanic of the slasher. In this, The Funhouse has more in common with non-slasher 1980s weirdness like The People Under the Stairs and Phantasm. This makes it quirky and interesting, but ultimately the demands of the formula – demands the filmmakers grudgingly acquiesce to in only a half-hearted manner – drag all that is novel and exciting about the film down a too familiar and (even by '81) quite tired rut.

About mid-way through the film, the foursome of as-yet-only-potential victims sees a freakshow display of a pickled punk, a most likely faked-up mutant fetus in a jar of alcohol. Strikingly misshapen and mutated, but dead on arrival and displayed in lifelessness: that's really a metaphor for the flick as a whole. The Funhouse stands as a case study in how pandering to the "keep it fun by giving me more of the same" mentality behind fan orthodoxy smothers interesting works.

Stuff: Hell for sale.

Last week, the operators of Astroland closed down the park several weeks prior to the regular October close of the season. The reason for this unexpected shutdown has something to do with their tangled relationship with Thor Realities, the development group that basically wants to convert Coney into an Atlantic City strip mall sans gambling.

For lovers of Coney Island, it’s a sad thing. As a type this, one-third of the park is now being dismembered and its parts sold off.

This would include Dante's Inferno, the third of the three rides I featured in my recent series on the fabulous haunted house rides of Coney.

Dante's Inferno is currently listed at Rides4U, an online site that specializes in selling new and used amusements to the carnival biz. The ticket price: $225,000.

If you do buy it, please give the old girl a good home. She's not the looker she used to be, but she is still very much loved.

Goodbye, DI. I'll miss you.

Stuff: The haunted houses of Coney Island: Part 3 – Dante's Inferno

The third and final stop on our tour of haunted house rides is Dante's Inferno.

As the middle child, stuck between its raucous and Rabelaisian younger brother (the Ghost Hole) and its legendary older sister (the Spook-A-Rama), Dante's Inferno has struggled to establish an identity of its own.

Located in Astroland Park, just a shout away from the famed Cyclone rollercoaster, Dants's Inferno opened in 1964 under the name Flight to Mars. The same year NASA failed to send Mariner 3 to Mars, riders at Coney Island could take the same trip for less than a buck. Flight to Mars rolled passengers past various "space age" scenes, including human contact with a vibrant Martian civilization. America's come-from-behind dominance in the space race and the sad realization that neither the moon nor Mars contained any societies more complex than anything you might find in vast stretches of the Midwest dealt a fatal blow to the crowd-drawing powers of Flight to Mars. After six years of economically-priced, family-friendly space exploration, Flight to Mars closed its doors.

In 1970s, along with most of the rest of the city, Flight to Mars went to Hell. The dark ride was replaced with a high-concept dark ride that actually took riders on a tour of Hell and the poet Dante imagined it. This proved a bit hoity-toity for the Coney crowd and, over time, the ride's theme was downgraded to a more generic, non-unified series of scares. The modern ride was the creation of famed attraction designer Anton Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf's responsible for several classic rollercoasters, including the King Cobra at King's Dominion in Virginia and the Shockwave at Six Flags Over Texas. Fans of 1970s disaster flicks may remember the Revolution from the schlocky 1977 thriller Rollercoaster. The Revolution, playing itself in the film, was designed by Anton Schwarzkopf. The Revolution was also the coaster the Griswolds ride in National Lampoon's Vacation.

Like all Coney Island dark rides, Dante's Inferno features an outsized mascot: A yellow, winged demon character holding a ghostly puppet in his left hand (Brutus, Cassius, or Judas about to be devoured? Your guess is as good as mine.).

The exterior of Dante's Inferno resembles some ren-fair castle and is studded with several bits of animatronic tomfoolery. Sadly, none of the pieces appear to work. This a real shame as the single most awesome bit monster in all of Coney can be found on the far left of the ride's façade, often hidden behind the ticket booth. Here's a photo I took on previous trip.

This bad boy is sometimes referred to as "the werewolf." In his more functional days, his carriage-support slid in and out of the castle façade, allowing the beast to lunge at passersby. I don't include a modern photo of this wonderful beastie as time and vandals have not been kind to him. Earlier this year, teens busted off his lower jaw.

Earlier I mentioned that overall balance of scare pieces on most rides falls somewhere in between Platonic poles: jump-out and tableaux scares. Well, Dante's makes a big freakin' liar out of me. Dante's is interesting in that it contains nothing but tableaux scare pieces. Some of them are quite modern; there's a dismemberment by circular saw scene that would fit right at home in Hostel film. Others, like a gorilla beating his chest in a cage, seem quaint.

Last but not least, here's the ride through video. If you've got your ears open, you'll hear the filmmaker (or his companion) ask if the other rider has ever been on a "pretzel" dark ride. That term refers to a specific sort of dark ride design in which riders move on flat surface over very twisty tracks. The car's orientation, and therefore the riders' point of view, twists back and forth as needed by the ride designer. Since the ride is mostly conducted in the dark, riders quickly loose their sense of orientation and get the feeling that they're covering enormous amounts of ground. The Spook-A-Rama is a classic pretzel ride. Dante's Inferno and the Ghost Hole are not pretzel rides because they follow a fairly linear track and contain multiple levels. Dante's Inferno even includes a slight "coaster dip," as you'll see.

Thanks for following me on this little tour. Enjoy the ride.

Stuff: The haunted houses of Coney Island: Part 2 - Spook-A-Rama

The second stop on our tour of Coney Island's haunted house rides is the wonderfully retro-named Spook-A-Rama. Spook-A-Rama is located in shadow of the Wonder Wheel. It is the oldest haunted house ride in Coney Island.

This famous dark ride was built by Fred Garms. Fred was the son of Herman Garms, the visionary Coney Island developer who created the Wonder Wheel. Garms, like his father, thought and built big. The original Spook-A-Rama ran the length of a city block. When it opened in 1955, the ride filled three buildings and its cars ran over a quarter mile of track, including intro section that ran through a translucent plastic tunnel that took rides under a waterfall of colored water. The ride was billed as "the world's longest spook ride."

The modern Spook-A-Rama is considerably smaller. Of the three structures originally dedicated to the Spook-A-Rama, only the middle and second largest building still houses the ride. The largest building is now dedicated to an arcade and the building that once housed the colored waterfall is now given over to various carnival games.

Unlike the other two haunted houses, Spook-A-Rama's exterior is pretty modest. It is a single story high and does not feature an elaborately painted façade. It does, however, feature two excellent animatronic components. The first is called the Reaper.

The photo above was taken with the glare off the Reaper's plexi-glass case. You can see from the reflection that 1) my wife is blonde, 2) my friend A. is really tall, and 3) the Wonder Wheel is literally a stone's throw away. The Reaper is situated out in front of the ride. He warns the weak of heart and other unfit specimens not to dare mind-shattering and unspeakable horror that is the Spook-A-Rama.

The other piece of animatronics appears on the roof of the ride. Just as Ghost Hole has its massive mascot, the Dark Prince of Love, Spook-A-Rama features a similarly oversized beastie: a spear-wielding, demon-headed, undead thing dressed in tatters. By virtue of his Year_zero weaponry and his castaway chic outfit, we've unofficially dubbed him Skeleton Crusoe.

Skeleton Crusoe stands about ten to fifteen feet high and, when functioning, alternately stands and squats above the dark rides entrance way. Admittedly, a giant skeleton popping a squat might not be the epitome of terror, but of all the oversized mascots, Skeleton Crusoe is the most detailed, best built one of the trio. He's also kept in the best repair.

For all the continuity of location, Spook-A-Rama's exterior has undergone near constant innovation. Before Skeleton Crusoe arrived, the roof of the ride featured a cartoonish cyclops who was surrounded by an ever changing and seemingly random cast of characters – including, at one point, life-sized sculptures of Laurel and Hardy. The cars have been swapped out numerous times, first with cars from a defunct Steeplechase Park dark ride in the 1960s and then with cars from a dark ride in Salem, NH, in the 1980s. There's only one constant: the entrance and exit doors, featuring paintings of eyes, have been part of the ride since it first opened.

On the spectrum of jump-out versus tableaux style scares, Spook-A-Rama features the greatest number of jump-out scares. Most of the ride's various gags lunge, fall, or swoop out at the rider. For fans dark rides, there's an added attraction to Spook-A-Rama's fright pieces. The on-going renovations to the ride have turned the inside of the ride into something like a fully-functioning museum of dark ride history. If a gag from the early days of the ride is still working, Spook-A-Rama doesn't rip it out. Consequently, riders are treated to a variety of scare sets that cover more than half a century's worth of dark ride style horror.

Here's an incomplete ride through. The poppin' fresh dance music was added by the filmmakers and is not part of the ride itself. Enjoy!

Stuff: The haunted houses of Coney Island: Part I – The Ghost Hole.

As the plans for the massive redevelopment/plunder of Coney Island have, yet again, been delayed, my wife, my friend A., and I took the opportunity to sneak off to New York's faded and fabulous boardwalk Babylon and experience the decaying playland's trio of terrifying haunted house rides.

We began our tour with the Ghost Hole, an independently run dark ride situated outside the two major parks of Coney – Astroland and Deno's Wonder Wheel Amusement Park – and just down the street from Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs.

Originally part of an amusement park in Ocean City, Maryland, the Ghost Hole (formerly the Hell Hole) was sold and shipped to Coney Island in the mid-1990s. Of the three haunted house rides in Coney, it's the youngest.

The façade of the Ghost Hole is the most modern, having a graffiti-like feel to it. It features three animatronic elements. The first, on the far left as you face the ride, is a demon stirring a cauldron. Sadly, the demon no longer works. It's still mounted on the ride's exterior, but it doesn't move. On the far right, there's a tangle of three snakes that bow up and down. Astute riders will notice that there is actually a mount for a fourth snake, but it has slithered off somewhere.

Every dark ride at Coney features some massive beast, a sort of dominant totem figure, that centers the exterior design. For the Ghost Hole, this figure head is a giant red demon that my friend A. simply refers to as the "the Dark Prince of Love."

I'm just guessing, but I reckon the Dark Prince of Love is 15 feet or so high. He stands astride a set of speakers that blast his roar into the construction site across the street. His jaw is nicely articulated, though not always perfectly in sync with his roaring – he's a demon from an Italian horror flick, I guess. He's also got an embarrassing hole in his loin cloth that reveals he's got nothing but an empty void for a crotch. He is understandably upset by this. Here's a YouTube clip of the Dark Prince of Love in action.



Besides having a name that sounds like a euphemism for something particularly disreputable ("I'm going to Coney to ride the Ghost Hole"), the Ghost Hole features a particularly vile bit of animatonic theater for the strong-stomached riders to enjoy while they wait in line: a animatronic man who is simultaneously vomiting and suffering from projectile diarrhea. That's right, a robot fighting a war on two fronts. It's all class at the Ghost Hole.

If a photo isn't doing it for you, here's a video somebody posted on the YouTube, complete with retching sounds.



I place the dark rides of Coney into a spectrum between two idealized categorical poles. This isn't an official taxonomic method used among fans of dark rides or anything, it's just something I use to describe the differences between dark rides. On one end of the spectrum, you've got the jump-out ride. These rides scoot you around a track and attempt to traumatize you by having suddenly appearing monsters lunge toward you. There's a lot of flashing lights and loud, abrupt noises. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the tableaux ride. These rides roll you past elaborate set ups, parading you through a series of terrible scenes. These rides move a little slower. The rider is supposed to soak in all the unpleasant details. All dark rides fall somewhere in between these two poles, mixing elements for both approaches. Of all the dark rides in Coney, the Ghost Hole is closest an even mix of both jump-out and tableaux scares. There's a lot of sudden, rushing monsters, but they've also included several inventive, relatively detailed scenes that the rider lingers over. On the downside, one of the set ups is what is supposed to be a man puking. Enough with the bodily functions, Ghost Hole! On the plus side, though I don't have any good images of it, the ride features a jump-out giant alligator. And, as we all know, giant alligators and crocodiles make anything better.

Here's YouTube ride through (complete with commentary by unimpressed filmmaker and companion). Enjoy!

Stuff: Goodbye, Dante's Inferno

The last of the three original parks of Coney Island, Astroland - home of the famed Wonder Wheel and Warriors - will be torn down soon.

For those who do not live in NYC and will not get a chance to get out to Coney Island before October, when the season officially ends, then this may well be you're last chance to see Dante's Inferno: the oldest of the two haunted house rides in the soon to be demolished Astroland theme park. Enjoy these photos, and my apologies for the blur – I'm not much of a photographer.

Here's a photo of the large yellow demon and Dante's Inferno sign that dominate the exterior of the ride. If you look closely, to the left of the demon, you can see one off two three-headed dragons that appear in the upper corners of the ride's exterior. The dragons used to flail their heads about, but I haven't seen them operational in a dog's age.

Here's a close-up of that yellow demon.

Here's a bit of the facade. This is to your right as you sit in the cars, before the ride begins.

More of the outside decoration. With ride employee.

This odd character is actually hidden away behind the ticket booth. He's actually a really nice monster, so I'm not sure why they've hidden him away. He used to actually "pop" out of the facade of the ride - an effect accomplished by the harness frame you can see under the beast's chest - but, like the three-headed dragons, he hasn't been fully operational for some time.

The second haunted house ride in Astroland is the more recent Spook-A-Rama. Here's a pic of the signage. Again, sorry for the crappy photo.

Since he's not that visible in my crappy wide-shot, here's a close-up of the monster on top of the Spook-A-Rama.

(Bonus: Eagle-eyed readers might be able to pick out the back of my newly-minted wife's head in the Wonder Wheel shot. She's the one wearing the brown baseball cap, a gift from the fine folks at Jack's Coffee in Greenwich Village.)