Final Scores – By Category:

Cast (20% of Final Score): 9

Costuming (10% of Final Score): 8.35

Customer Service (10% of Final Score): 8.9

Immersion (10% of Final Score): 8.2

Special Effects (15% of Final Score): 7.9

Scare Factor (20% of Final Score): 8.1

Entertainment & Value (15% of Final Score): 8

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Final Scores – By Attraction:

Mayhem in the Madness: 8.35

The Scarizona Scaregrounds are a somewhat difficult haunt to review.  Their website boasts two attractions, Mayhem in the Madness and Startled Darkness.  This is somewhat misleading.  Mayhem in the Madness is an extremely fun, well-executed attraction with a solid, well-stocked cast and a tremendous amount of effort that went into it.  Startled Darkness, on the other hand, is a relatively short dark maze that takes up less than a third of the total time you’ll be on the Scaregrounds, and is in no way strong enough to be its own attraction. 

For this review, we will treat Mayhem as the only main attraction in Scarizona, with Startled Darkness as a bonus despite the marketing.  This feels like the only fair way to review it, as one of the attractions clearly had the bulk of the effort and energy, and we want that to carry the bulk of this review.  From this point forward, discussion of Startled Darkness will be relegated to the Entertainment and Value section of this review, discussing other entertainment.

All that being said, Scarizona was some of the most fun Team Jackalope has had in a while at a haunted attraction.  Even for just Madness it is well worth the price of admission, and you would be doing yourself a disservice if you missed out on it.  If you’re anywhere near Mesa, Arizona, and you like spooky fun, you need to come here and check it out.  Next year, they’re planning on completely redoing the haunt, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with.

When the cast is having fun and is wholly committed the whole atmosphere of a haunt is electric, and Scarizona is blessed with an abundance of fantastic, dedicated ghouls and creeps.  Despite the nearly hundred-degree temperature in the desert wasteland they’d created, every single person I encountered was fully and enthusiastically in character, many of them performing a variety of physical stunts without any sign of fatigue or discomfort.  I’m genuinely not sure how they pulled it off without heat stroke.  On any given night, they tend to have anywhere between 25 and 45 actors, most of them experienced veterans coming from one of the local theatre groups.  On the night Jackalope visited there were only 27, at the low end of the scale, but you’d have never felt like they were short-staffed.

Each character felt unique in their behaviors and dialogue.  They all engaged with me in different ways, from quiet menace bursting into sudden aggression to manic, unhinged friendliness.  I was bullied, berated, threatened, begged for help, and growled at in a plethora of different ways.  I need to give a special shout-out to a friendly, taller clown that somehow seemed to be able to teleport, appearing behind me at various points throughout the haunt.  It’s hard to genuinely surprise me anymore, but he managed it multiple times.  Every time he’d materialize he’d greet me cheerfully as an old friend (that had long since lost his grip on reality).  He made the night.

Costumes and special effects makeup ranged from good to great to stellar at this attraction.  The entirety of makeup in this haunt is done by one artist, with the cast blocking out their own things and leaving the detail work to her.  That is astounding to me, as nearly every character felt complete and unique in some way.  Even the clowns, generally the phone-it-in-easy mode of SFX makeup, each felt unique and well-formed in their own way.  Dolls were suitably creepy and cracked, demons glared, and there was nothing that pulled me out of the scene.  Technically, it was nearly flawless, the only mistake I noticed was a single character missing blackout makeup under his mask.  I only noticed that because I’ve been trained to look for it. I doubt a regular customer would have even looked twice.

I really need to mention one of the queue actors’ costumes; it was one of the coolest I’ve ever seen.  He was a massive clown, with another smaller clown crawling up out of his mouth.  Everything about his look was detailed and fantastic, it looked flawless, and, of course, I had to use him as the main image for this review.  The giant hammer he carried was almost overkill; that face alone marked him in my memory.  I harp on the need for unique characters in nearly every review I write, Scarizona absolutely delivered here.

For the most part customer service here was flawless.  It’s not difficult to find the attraction, though it is a very creepy drive down a dirt road off the highway through what appears to be an abandoned construction site.  There are plenty of attendants to make sure you don’t get lost on the way, and every non-costumed employee was unfailingly cheerful, informative, and polite.
 
I do need to dock the rating a bit, however, due to the way information is conveyed on their website.  To start with Startled Darkness is in no way a full attraction, and their main website is misleading about it.  The trailer shows multiple characters within it, and their description of the attraction says there will be close encounters with people from all angles.  There was a total of one cast member in this attraction at the very end, and the whole thing was short.  This feels misguided in their marketing, at best.

An additional point of confusion is the need for proper footwear.  The descriptions for both Mayhem and Startled Darkness say that you MUST HAVE closed-toed shoes to enter.  To see this, you need to expand the descriptions of the attractions; it’s not just on the screen at the start.

While there was no storyline at all other than “Here’s some spooky stuff,” I felt fully immersed in the experience from start to finish.  The Scaregrounds are a large gravel lot that has been filled with old cars, shipping containers, and signs.  The cast seemed to circulate in and out of the areas on their whim, and I saw multiple guests being harassed or startled by different spooks throughout the night.  It’s remarkable in that everything looks ramshackle and thrown together, but the net effect is incredibly solid at welcoming you to a post-apocalyptic party.  Even leaving an attraction tends to bring the haunt with you, as cast members will chase you out of the attraction and into the common areas.  It was delightful.

Special effects were solidly deployed, and while nothing stood out to me as I made my way through, certainly nothing detracted from the experience.  The use of animatronics was skillfully done, largely using them as distractions or ways to keep people off balance while making their way through the twists and turns of the haunt.  The set design was especially great, with everything having a homemade look, made out of shipping containers and junk but feeling unique in its aesthetic.  There wasn’t much of a flow from one scene to another; it was mostly random, but the randomness seemed to add to its DIY charm rather than feel like a negative.  Sound effects were minimal, with a few voices in the animatronics, but there’s nothing to complain about either. 

Overall, it’s the cast you’re going to be blown away by, not the tech on display, but it does a solid job of supporting the strength of the haunt.

Scarizona brought the scares.  Mayhem in the Madness is built for cast flexibility.  More than once, I’d narrowly escape a character, only to have them pop up further down the line as the maze doubled me back, and their network of passageways allowed them to get ahead of or behind me more or less at will.  There was a wide variety of scares as they came at me from all angles, and at no point was I ever bored or not on edge. 

It was tremendously fun to see them properly leverage their cast to maximum effect and allow their cast to let their creative drives go crazy in acting however they wanted. It was disjointed enough that it shouldn’t have worked, but somehow, every bit of it added to a discordant chorus that absolutely did.

This haunt offers a decent experience, though the value comes in at about 0.47 minutes per dollar, which is fair but not the highest we’ve seen.  That said, the bang for your buck is still good; you won’t be disappointed by the ticket price after you go through the attraction. 

While Startled Darkness is not at all a full main attraction, when looked at as a bonus, it’s a perfectly fine dark maze, with enough cool set pieces and animatronics to keep you a bit on edge and focused.  Going through it totally on my own was suitably creepy, and if it’s included in the ticket price, I would still do it.  There wasn’t much else going on at the fairgrounds, though they do have a little outdoor café selling water, canned soda, some alcohol, and shoulder buddies that were sadly out of stock when I was there. 

If you get the chance, absolutely come here; you’ll be well entertained for your dollar.