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Review: Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights gets better as crowds grow bigger

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Just when you think Halloween Horror Nights can’t possibly get any better, the annual Universal Studios Hollywood event finds new and more impressive ways to terrorize you.

Like an evil genius devising more deviously clever ways to dispatch his victims, Horror Nights has upped its industry-leading game once again with a host of otherworldly and mythological puppet creatures that will take your breath away with their frightening realism.

The downside of this new level of excellence is an unprecedented level of popularity. At one point during my visit on opening night, all but two of the haunted mazes boasted hour-plus wait times.

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Indeed, the trio of mazes on the studio backlot had a combined wait time of four hours that produced a sea of people as far as the eye could see. Adding insult to injury, Horror Nights made visitors hoof it from the lower lot to the backlot rather than transporting them by tram as in years past, giving new meaning to The Walking Dead.

The challenge for Universal is capacity within the confines of a relatively small theme park that has grown increasingly cramped with the construction of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and the Simpson’s village of Springfield.

But even without the endless string of construction walls pinching in on the teeming masses, the increasing popularity of Horror Nights has made the crowding issue worse with each passing year.

What Universal needs to do is add more haunted mazes without sacrificing quality - which is a difficult and expensive task with the brand name horror properties used for each maze.

One solution would be to bring back some of the greatest hits from years past - Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw Massacre - to take some of the pressure off each year’s newest attractions.

Another alternative would be to introduce a second tier of mazes based on lesser-known movies, television shows and video games.

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A third option would be to offer more generically themed mazes based on the Killer Z themes - like Toyz, Witchez, Freakz, Pigz, Lunaticz and Nightmarez - that Horror Nights has mostly relegated to scare zones.

Whatever the solution, something needs to be done before Horror Nights creeps to a halt under the sheer weight of humanity.

Let’s take a look at the Halloween Horror Nights 2014 mazes, ranked from best to worst:

Much to my surprise, the maze based on the 1981 film “An American Werewolf in London” delivered the best all-around experience of the evening with a strong combination of storytelling, scenery, traditional “scareactors” and puppeted creatures.

The maze ingeniously employed a host of puppets paired with scareactors, operated by hidden puppeteers or loaded on wheeled carts. Closely examining how the puppetry was achieved only made the resulting experience all the more fascinating.

The highlight of the American Werewolf maze: A stunning recreation of the man-to-beast transformation that won the film an Academy Award for makeup special effects.

Alien vs. Predator was easily my most anticipated maze of the night and based on the seemingly never-ending line snaking up to the entrance, many in attendance felt the same way.

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AVP did not disappoint, bringing to life the film’s complicated and challenging extraterrestrial creatures with scenes so startlingly scary you’d think you’d stepped into the movie. Years from now, Horror Nights fans will still be recalling the Alien vs. Predator maze as a high-water mark of unparalleled accomplishment.

The best scene in the AVP maze: A living room covered with an alien fungus that has trapped a handful of helpless victims, including a terrified pair that are still very much alive.

The only downside of the stellar achievement was the sheer amount of people shoved into the AVP maze like meat through a grinder as Horror Nights employees tried in vain to cull the 100-minute line. The constant conga line telegraphed all the monster choreography and ruined any possibility of scares.

The From Dusk Till Dawn maze featured a rarity for Horror Nights - a female antagonist - even if the snake-charming dancer Santanico Pandemonium was dressed in a skimpy black bikini in every scene.

The best looking maze of the evening took visitors inside The Twister nightclub which slowly devolved from a swank strip club into an underground Satanic lair.

After a few misfires with 3D in the past, the Clowns 3D maze put the gimmicky effect to its best use yet at Horror Nights with a garish trip inside an unsanitary ice cream factory run by demented clowns.

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While the hall of mirrors section at the beginning of the maze was uneventful, Clowns 3D took a turn for the dark side during a foul-smelling bathroom scene and got wonderfully weirder the deeper we journeyed into the moribund frozen treat factory.

The deranged and slightly off-key circus sideshow-meets-freaky funhouse soundtrack fit the mood perfectly but was nothing like you’d expect from former Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash, who lent his imprimatur to the maze.

It’s a testament to the quality of this year’s Horror Nights that The Walking Dead: End of the Line maze fell this far down the list. This wonderful maze still packs them in even if the storyline is largely unchanged from last year, save for a few new scenes.

The impressive finale in the Walking Dead maze finds a handful of zombies stuck in rockpile at the abandoned Terminus railyard.

It’s too bad the year-round House of Horrors attraction is closing for good after struggling for years to find a theme that worked during Horror Nights.

The combination of Face Off characters from the SyFy reality competition show with a pounding dub-step soundtrack fit the space perfectly and left me looking forward to each new scare, of which there were many.

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I only wish I had more time to appreciate each of the custom-created monsters before they went back into hiding.

My only disappointment: The mad scientist’s laboratory, which would have been a great place to get a close look at the SyFy creations, was virtually devoid of monsters.

I certainly hope Face Off: In the Flesh becomes a regular addition to Horror Nights and finds a new and permanent home at the event.

You know Horror Nights is doing something right if the Dracula Untold: Reign in Blood maze is the biggest letdown of the night.

While the sets and props looked fantastic, the origins backstory for this upcoming vampire movie just didn’t translate and the characters weren’t scary.

Horror Nights seemed to acknowledge as much, putting the Dracula maze on the theme park’s upper lot with Face Off. Both mazes had short lines that rarely exceeded 15 minutes all night long as visitors voted with their feet and headed to the lower lot and studio backlot for the marquee attractions.

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While the scare zones are usually an afterthought at Horror Nights, this year’s Dark Christmas stood out as a perfect example of an original theme that could make a wonderful maze.

With a bizarre combination of horned beast stilt walkers and ax-wielding little people in yuletide garb, the twisted take on the holidays tells the story of mythical demonic creatures like Krampus and the Christmas Devil that drag disobedient children to Hell. The intriguing backstory was largely lost on the visitors passing through Baker Street in the London section of the park.

This year’s Terror Tram experience was by far the best of any Halloween Horror Nights - and the most confusing.

Horror Nights has once again infested the Bates Motel and War of the Worlds areas of the backlot with double to triple the amount of Walking Dead zombies as in years past - making for the best use of those outdoor spaces in the history of the event. I loved the walkers heading upstream against traffic, working in tandem to execute tag-team scares again and again.

The only problem: The Terror Tram won’t take you to the Walking Dead maze, as I and many others found out when we returned to the theme park from the backlot.

Finally, let me bid a long overdue farewell to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Halloween Adventure, which was unceremoniously axed during last year’s Horror Nights and didn’t return this year.

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I was worried the thousands of people the nightly shows vacuumed off the streets of Horror Nights would make the already crowded conditions worse, but the absence of the woeful pop culture musical revue seemed to have little impact.

Hopefully the time-traveling duo won’t be rising from the dead at any future Horror Nights.

Halloween Horror Nights 2014 runs on select nights at Universal Studios Hollywood through Nov. 2.

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