While staying in Orlando for a conference I had the opportunity to visit Universal Studio's Halloween Horror Nights. Having a well-known reputation as an aficionado of the holiday, many people had told me about how much I would like it. I wish they had been right.

The premise is fairly simple. After dark some of the studios and back-stage areas of the theme park are converted to "haunted houses." Guests queue up in tremendously long lines to enter — wait times often exceed an hour — then spend five minutes walking single file through a variety of grisly set pieces while costumed college kids jump out to try and elicit screams from drunk college girls. When you re-emerge into the Florida humidity you immediately rush to the next line.

Sadly, most of the houses rely on the cheapest of thrills: loud noises and ambushes. I'm not really certain why this surprises me, though, as most modern horror films do the same thing, which is why I so seldom bother with them. I guess I'm just not their target audience.

Either that, or I just didn't spend enough money on drinks. Every fifty feet or so there's another booth selling beer, liberally interspersed with mixed drink and shot kiosks. There are even young girls wandering around with trays of gigantic plastic syringes full of Jell-O "shots". Maybe if I had gotten into the spirits of the event I would have been better prepared to enjoy it for what it is, and not what it could have been.

There were some interesting and creative presentations, though, so it wasn't a total loss. For the morbidly curious, here are some capsule reviews of the eight "houses."

• Dead Silence: the Curse of Mary Shaw. This was one of the better houses, with minimal reliance on cheap gore, and good attention to atmosphere. This felt the most like I was walking through a film.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamwalkers. So-so. A few nice sets, but nothing spectacular.
• Psychoscareapy: Home for the Holidays. Ah, yes, the once marginally-clever combination of Christmas and Halloween, now just an excuse to drape intestines on a Christmas tree.
• Vampyr: Bloodbath. Lots of gore, some with a slightly creative slant. The pounding club music added a nice touch, though, and hot goth chicks with plunging necklines are always worth bonus points.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Flesh Wounds. The only house I was willing to let slide on gore because hey, this franchise started the trend. It still managed to be pedestrian.
• Friday the 13th: Camp Blood. trudge. Trudge. Boo! Trudge. Trudge. Blood! Exit. I don't know, maybe these are better if you're a fan of the movies.
• Jack's Funhouse in Clown-O-Vision. Easily the best of the houses, with clever and disorienting effects via 3-D glasses. The combination of strobes lights, funhouse mirrors, fluorescent paint, and polarized lenses was pretty intense, too.
• The Thing: Assimilation. Slightly better sets, walking you through a biohazard containment facility which failed to contain. Gruesome rubber monsters in the vein of the film, but not as many jump-outs. Felt like an ad for a sequel, though (and maybe it is).

There were also some shows, but even paying double-price to get express lane tickets it still took hours to go through the lines so we skipped them. A few of the streets were redesigned as quasi-attractions, with undead bikers, a carnival freakshow (with a real woman sharing a small glass coffin with a dozen or so live rats), and a fog covered Victorian street populated with pallid characters. Frankly, the last of these was possibly the closest to what I think of as a Hallowe'en attraction — wandering through thick fog only to emerge barely a foot from a eerie woman in a tattered black corset and petticoats ensemble. It's too bad they couldn't evoke that kind of creepiness for the whole night, but then, that wouldn't seel as many beers.

Perhaps that's the real horror. I've grown too old for modern Hallowe'en.