This year’s Sinister Pointe haunted attraction is titled “Fear the Mark” and, in the narrative, takes place right after their very entertaining, pre-season “Seance” haunted experience. Apparently, the resident medium opened a portal into four hell dimensions and it’s up to you to find your way through to safety. Depending on which demon you get “assigned” in a small Tarot card reading moment, you will get access to special “key rooms” just for that demon throughout the haunted attraction. This means that you have four possible configurations of the attraction to experience. This is a great concept, and when I first heard about it back at Midsummer Scream I was excited because of its ingenuity.
We got the chance to go through each of the demon experiences during our visit to Sinister Pointe. Our favorite of the four configurations was the demon “Rebus” – so if your medium pulls that Tarot card for you, expect fun things. Each of the demon paths offer something different in their special key rooms, some requiring guests to crawl, move through tight spaces, sometimes a combination of the two – and more. In typical Sinister Pointe fashion, they manage to pull a couple cool tricks out of their bag that I had not seen before in other haunted attractions.
Unfortunately, a few big problems plague the 2016 Sinister Pointe Haunted Attraction. The first of these is a strange disparity of of high and low production value when it comes to rooms inside the maze. Some look absolutely great – in fact, the first real room you enter has a creepy medium hand you a Tarot-style card with one of the four demons featured on it. This room has amazing decoration and design and was a high mark to set when just entering the experience. However, some rooms look really bad – mostly when considering the level of work Sinister Pointe is capable of (and has delivered) in past experiences. The best of the worst example for this is a central room that resembles a sort of skate park with a wedge/ramp in the middle that a monster can slide across. The walls of this black light lit room feature haphazardly spray-painted neon outlines of doors, not making a whole lot of sense. I don’t know if they just ran out of time or money or whatever – but this disparity of quality definitely shows. Finally, it didn’t feel as though there were many monsters in the maze – I would like to see more in there to scare guests. To their credit, the monsters that were inside the maze were doing their very best and delivering good creep-factor and jump scares where able, so big kudos to them as those monsters are going to make or break Sinister Pointe’s attraction this year.
A ticket for one time through the Sinister Pointe Haunted Attraction can be purchased for about $24 dollars. An “all-night”, pass which allows trips throughout every demon key room configuration, can be purchased for about $34 dollars. When we break down the cost of the all night ticket, it comes out to about $8 per demon – a really nice value considering the cost of one demon ticket is $24 dollars. Also, please note that tickets are sold in the front side of the shopping center that Sinister Pointe is located in while the actual entrance to the haunted attraction is located around the back of the center.
Overall, Sinister Pointe’s 2016 haunted attraction is an entertaining time so long as you pick up up the ticket allowing you access to all four demon paths in the maze. It’s a bit more expensive than the one-time through ticket, but well worth it as you will see all the special key rooms they have to offer.
Sinister Pointe
1851 W. Orangethorpe Ave.
Fullerton, California
You can find out more about Sinister Pointe including ticket information at their official website.
