More reviews will come on their respective threads after my long-awaited trip to Epic yesterday, but I want to talk about this first.
I held off for a whole year on watching any videos of the ride. There were unfortunately a couple of clips that got spoiled for me like the Phantom and the preshow, but other than that, I was able to avoid about 88% of spoilers for this. When I walked in and finally rode, I had pretty high expectations for this ride….and they exceeded basically all of them.
My mouth was open the whole entire ride being giddy like a kid on Christmas Day for the entire ride. I could not believe this whole ride was real. The best way I would describe this ride would be as if you had a really wild dream about a cool ride, you wake up, and realize what you experienced was just a dream and you were bummed out none of it was real…except it was.
I am flabbergasted that the creative team seemed to have so much freedom to do what they wanted with this concept. Just about all of the animatronics were very fluid and articulate and looked like it was straight out of the animation segments from the video footage. All of those impressive effects and animatronics for a literal horror ride.
I managed to get three rides on this thing thanks to the line being so short. I needed those three rides because there was literally so much going on at once you will need more than one ride to catch everything that happens. Even then you’ll probably notice smaller details with each ride. The small details like Victoria Frankenstein staring at you while telling you to behold Dracula and the ride vehicle going into insaneo mode right when crap hits the fan were excellent touches. Tony Baxter famously said that a good ride will offer a lot of repeatability….and this ride brings it.
Speaking of vehicle motion….my goodness this thing was aggressive. I was caught off-guard on how much it jerks you around. This thing was a literal thrill ride and the motion matched with the intensity of the experience. They didn’t hold back on any of the horror experiences and the creatures looked scary!
There were unfortunately some aspects of the ride that weren’t working. Victoria Frankenstein was completely absent in the preshow so I was left to look at her on the screen. Her monster was working in the preshow though. Igor had a curtain in front of his booth unfortunately and the first Wolfman animatronic was frozen (The one where he’s with one of Dracula’s brides.) other than that, everything worked great and I was still blown away. I think that’s a testament to how well done this ride is.
Overall Monsters Unchained is a spectacular ride that felt like it shouldn’t have happened but did. Even with the two AAs down, I would say this ride was perfect. No seriously, it’s perfect. I don’t know what else they could possibly do to make this ride any better. It is incredible. This is my all-time favorite dark ride and yes I would put this above Rise of the Resistance. Shoot me. I will die on this hill. Everything about this was clearly a passion project from the creative team and it shows. It’s a shame it’s getting such short wait times because the GP can’t recognize greatness.