This was mentioned on the #onlyconnect thread but in case you missed it this sounds Very Much Like The Sort Of Thing We Like. Here’s Chris’ comment:
Changing the subject: “Dracula; Escape The Castle” runs weekly at 10pm on Sunday nights on INsight (Sky 564), a channel of which I had not previously heard, or available online the next day. Bonus points for the apparent inclusion of a semi-colon in the show’s title. (Is this a first?)
“Dracula, Escape the Castle is an original, bloodcurdling gameshow which sees two duos trapped within an authentic Romanian castle, with only one night to escape ‘Dracula’. The contestants vary from lovers and family members, to best friends and colleagues. Locked inside the castle walls by charismatic host, Brendan Moar, duos must escape by completing various mental and physical challenges.
In each episode, the two couples face three stages of being locked in room, with the ultimate goal of escaping in the fastest time. The fastest couple to escape the first two rooms, gain a 30 second time advantage in the final stage. This final is a frantic race to ignite a giant bat silhouette on the castle courtyard.
Dracula is a game of skill, courage and trust: skill to escape the rooms; courage to find clues; and trust in your fellow teammate. To survive, contestants will have to utilise their skills and face their worst fears.”
Might be a bit Estate of Panic. Might not.
Anyway I can’t say I’ve heard of the channel either but I’ll certainly be looking forward to watching it probably online tomorrow (I’m on Virgin Media and Dracula can’t touch virgins) (I’ve actually made that up but it would be brilliant if we could retcon the story to make the joke work thanks). If you have Sky and you watch tonight do let us know what you think.
In other news if you like your games horror themed, GSN has put up the first ep of its new series of Hellevator up on Youtube for whatever reason and apparently ungeoblocked. It’s a bit more elaborate than the first season, better endgame, I’ve discussed it here.
Finally whilst we’re on the ghost train they’ve been filming the third series of Release the Hounds the last few weeks. I don’t know where they’ve been filming, I don’t know where they’ve got the contestants from (there’s been no obvious contestant call out this time round) and I don’t know when it’s going out – a report from a little while ago suggested 2017. We look forward to it all the same. It will be interesting to see if not filming in the height of Summer makes any sort of difference.
New Hellevator was pretty good. Has more of a Fort Boyard vibe to it now. I love the new inferno endgame, it gives a real consequence for the team failing the main challenges. I can see this show evolving and becoming really great, the way Release The Hounds has changed itself over seasons.
So, Dracula works as follows. We see two teams of two try to complete different rooms at the same time (it seems like it actually is the same time because at one point the teams hear each other). Teams auto-fail if they take 20-minutes or if they use the safeword. The best total time gets a 30-second advantage in the final, there is also an extra 30-seconds for each room failed. (This cancels if both teams fail rooms).
In episode 1 team A’s first room was team B’s second, so we only see 3 rooms in total. The rooms are all basically 1-step challenges, I would say from the low to very low end of the Crystal Maze quality spectrum. There’s a fair “I can’t see what I have to do” factor, but this actually gets quite annoying because it doesn’t feel (to me) like the teams are given enough direction.
The final is a head-to-head, and requires the teams to run around a large area of castle gathering skulls, which they then have to take out to the courtyard and balance on an unstable platform. Once they have enough on there they ‘release’ a torch which they can use to light the batsymbol and win.
Honestly, I really can’t reccomend watching Dracula, except as an interesting example of how not to do things. The one thing it has going for it is the aesthetics – the castle is cool and everything looks very lovely – but the games are just *so* badly designed. Watching people fail to ‘get’ simple tasks was fun on TCM because it was snappy and actually easy. But on dracula, you’re watching people reasonably fail to do something for ~20 minutes, because the game has been badly designed.
The show is *extremely* slow, 2 rounds and a final in 50 minutes – and the time is filled out by endless confessional clips. Seriously, so many confessionals. There’s nowhere near enough threat in anything for it to be properly scary, so a lot of the horror stuff (including the host style) comes across as (at best) hammy and (at worst) hugely misjudged. The final is exciting for about 12 seconds while they’re running around looking for skulls, then it turns into a slowed down version of the treasure room. Even the lighting of the bat didn’t work properly.
All in all, perhaps an interesting idea, but extremely badly executed.
You can watch it here:
http://www.insight.tv/#!/eab91/en/show/dracula/episode-1/dracula-season-1-episode-1
I’ll disagree slightly – I quite enjoyed it, it felt like the sort of thing that with a bit of love (and a bit of budget) could be really good, as it is it felt a little bit like it had been made by some university media students given a castle and about ten quid and told to make a show. There’s a certain honesty to it that I find quite appealing, a show that *tries* and succeeds in its basic ideas of looking quite nice and aping US reality constructs but falls a bit short in the actual content.
Tom’s criticisms are completely correct – the games each feel like half an idea and don’t feature nearly enough reasoning although in some cases I can see what they were trying to do – turning the skull puzzle into a communication test mainly hampered by the contestants apparently not spotting it. They needed to explain precisely what the letters on the wall were hinting at. Using a clue from an earlier game on a later one was *almost* clever, except without a hint as to which of the many books it was it felt a bit useless (the host at great pains to point out what a great clue it was when it wasn’t really).
The endgame is quite funny although about five minutes too long. The idea that if you light up a bat a man in a cloak gives you a key that unchains the giant door is quite amusing but probably for the wrong reasons.
For the first time ever I don’t mind the confessionals because there’s not enough in the games to fill the time very well.
I can’t take the host seriously. And the horror aspects are schlocky rather than terrifying. CUT TO A SPIDER which the contestants will never have to encounter.
So I’m in an unusual position of fully admitting the show’s rather large issues, but despite everything quite enjoying it anyway. I’m not really one for letting things off because it’s heart is in the right place but I’m almost willing to make an exception.
Thanks to Alex for the tip off.
The Crystal Maze to open in Manchester, ‘in a larger studio’:
http://the-crystal-maze.com/crystal-maze-open-manchester/
I’m thinking they already might have gotten a tentative green light for the revival series based on that info…
Yes I think this is the obvious conclusion.
So here’s what I discovered with my evening; the makers of Dracula, Insight, also have 10 episodes of a creation called “Spartan X” on their website. It’s from the Hercules/Eternal Glory/Ultimate Hell Week mould of “fitness camp gameshow”. Like Dracula, it uses irritatingly many confessionals and eeks out 50 minutes of content from 3 games, BUT, it is a heck of a lot more interesting IMO.
The concept is basically international Hercules, or, The Physical Genius, if I may. 12(6m/6f) miscellaneous sportspeople (free runners, Martial Artists, weightlifters, marathon runners) from various countries compete for a final prize of 40,000EUR.
Based on watching 2 episodes in full, 2 more skipping to the rules and 2 more reading the episode descriptions, I have the following understanding of the ‘format’ (which is never properly explained):
*The contestants are sorted into “Spartans” who live in a castle in (relative) luxury, and “Exiles” who live in a tent and have fetch the water for the Spartans. A lot of the inter-challenge time is filled by talking about the relative niceness of the castle to the tent.
*The first challenge is an all-play. If an Exile wins, they are promoted to a Spartan and the worst-placed Spartan is demoted to Exile. Usually the placing order for the Spartans gives some advantage in the next challenge.
*The second challenge is among the Spartans. If it’s an elimination episode then the worst performer is demoted to Exile. If it’s not an elimination episode, the best performing (n) Spartans or team of Spartans is safe from the third challenge, unless it’s not a general knowledge question.
*If it’s an elimination episode then the third challenge is an elimination challenge among the Exiles. The worst performer is eliminated *and* the best performer is promoted to Spartan. If it isn’t an elimination episode then the third challenge is among the Spartans who didn’t win safety in the second challenge, and the worst performer is demoted to Exile.
*All this is except the first episode, which is different. Sometimes, (if it’s a particularly high-endurance challenge?) the women are given a handicap, but usually not. It’s suggested each episode was 3 days of real time, which means this thing must have taken ages to film.
I’ve been finding it… quite good? I’m very aware of the slowness, but the challenges on the whole are interesting. Every challenge is physical, but almost every challenge has a skill/strategy/puzzle angle to it aswell.
For example, my favourite challenge so far (last 8 mins of ep2 if you want to check) involves 6 players having 15 minutes to shuttle water into a barrel, then roll the barrel to the finish. The loser is the one the furthest from getting to the finish at timeout OR the one with least water in the barrel if everyone finishes – Barrel Chicken.
I find the confessionals less annoying [compared to Dracula] because the sportspeople are generally more interesting and sincere, and because the challenges are more complex so they have more to talk about. The emphasis on the pleasant/unpleasant living style gets a bit repetitive after a few eps, and the lack of a clear explanation of the format (and the fact some eps are non-elimination) means I sometimes don’t know why I should care about who’s going to win/lose this challenge. Like Dracula, the aesthetics are really nice. They use the castle cleverly as a visual synecdoche, which is nice because the castle is unintentionally in the distant background a lot of the time. The whole thing is set in the Hungarian(?) countryside, and the challenges are a lot more Hercules than Ultimate Hell Week (although generally not particularly endurance-y). The (3) hosts are a bit misjudged and not really needed as much as they appear because the information is communicated with the confessionals. I’d like to have seen more emphasis placed on the differences between the contestants’ backgrounds and skills, and how they were relevant to the games. But, I do *really* like some of the challenges. I also just like watching fit people accomplish difficult things, though, so that may be telling.
If it’s the same Brendan Moar I’m thinking of (blonde Aussie?), “charismatic” is absolutely not a word I’d use to describe him.
Yeah. I thought he was South African for some reason.
He used to host an Australian reality show creatively titled The Renovators (I’ll wait while you guess what the show was about). It’s telling that he was one of the worst things in a show where they literally had challenges involving hammering nails correctly and building Lego structures.
This week: stacking uneven blocks in the dark, searching for chemicals in a laboratory, scratching nails (again).