THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 29, 1994 TAG: 9410290019
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
HALLOWEEN MAY have its little shops of horrors scattered around Hampton Roads: a ghost walk here, a goblin show there.
But at the Vietnam Vets Haunted Forest they've gone beyond a shop of horrors to a spine-tingling shopping mall of the macabre that is literally hell on wheels.
We are talking big-time horror here with 27 heart-pounding, blood-sucking, spine-freezing, tableaux of terror situated in the ghostly confines of the Norfolk Botanical Gardens.
Thrill-seekers boarding trams winding through the garden roll past bodies boiled in kettles by witches and torture victims writhing as they hang like sausages on the grill of the garden gates. On the whole it is a lot scarier than the night they found the bloody glove behind the pool house in O.J.'s Brentwood home.
Our tour guide during a recent trip through the forest was The Black Widow Lady, clad in black, who had the demeanor of a flight attendant moonlighting as a mortician. ``May you ride in peace and rest in pieces,'' she said. It was a prelude of what was to come. The forest has more separated body parts than a NAPA warehouse.
If there's anything terrifying Frank Lipoli and the Vietnam Vets missed in this field of screams we couldn't think of it.
Goblins don't go bump in the night at the Haunted Forest. They boom - thanks to sound boxers and amplifiers - like the crash of a 747 jet. Come to think, they've even tossed in a plane crash scene. We see dozens of survivors, broken and bloodied, tumbling out of their seats groaning like UNC Coach Mack Brown after the Virginia-North Carolina football game.
Merman Productions has outdone itself with sound effects and the 120 exploding flashpots lift tram passengers out of their seats about every 30 seconds.
Trust me, this tram tour of the terrifying is so vivid and horrible, it suggests the Rush Limbaugh view of America under the presidency of Bill Clinton:
Headless victims running wildly though the woods, chased by a vrrroooming chain-saw, body parts flying off their torsos like clippings from hedges.
And that's merely one scene. It takes 200 volunteers - actors and staff - to do the production nightly. Supplies for the event include 50 gallons of Karo syrup to simulate blood and cases of breakfast cereal (used to give actors the appearance that skin is peeling).
With shriek scenes ranging from a mummy invasion to the shower scene in the movie ``Psycho,'' the haunted forest is expected to draw 14,000 visitors this weekend. Now in its fifth year, the Vietnam Vets Haunted Forest has become the Knotts Berry Farm of Halloween.
The state's tourism board - which must have missed the last debate between candidates for the U.S. Senate - has listed the haunted forest as the state's biggest horror show.
Frank Lipoli - who runs the Botanical Gardens' Tea Room - gets credit for turning a quiet refuge for nature lovers into a blitzkrieg of bedlam at this time of year.
A little over five years ago he suggested that the gardens would be an ideal location for productions of - a little Sinatra music here, maestro - stranglers in the night and the lady is a vamp. With its darkened walkways, somber pines, and a fleet of wheeled carts already operating in the park, Lipoli felt the gardens were ideal for a Halloween presentation.
He chose the vets from chapter 48 of Vietnam Veterans of America as helpers - and beneficiaries of proceeds that to date total more than $60,000 - because he was in college during that war. ``Many of my friends did go to that war and didn't come back. I thought it was my way of doing my fair share,'' he said.
Most of the actors are from area high schools who enjoy the work and are doing a great job scaring people, Lipoli claimed. He says when the tour of the terrifying is over, many children wind up in their fathers' laps frozen with fear - not all of them toddlers. A few of the dad-clingers are old enough to buy a beer without ID.
The tram rides begins with musical and dance skits - The Beetlejuice Rock 'n' Roll Revue - by Beth's School of Dance in Virginia Beach. (Vampires, Dracula, and Frankenstein's Monster. They do everything except ``I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.'') And it ends with the Tunnel of Terror, which is 100-feet long, with 17 sound speakers and 1,000 watts of power. The tunnel has seven rooms of terror inside and the total effect is like being stuffed inside a sausage-shaped asylum for the criminally insane.
Walden Pond it ain't. But it excites Frank Lipoli. ``We used more blood this year in one night than we did in Halloween of '93,'' he said, bouncing around on the balls of his feet. He looked like what he was. Our heavyweight fright champion. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Gary C. Knapp
Emma Wellman plays a witch while Rachel Kilgore stews in a caldron
at the Haunted Forest.
by CNB