2.8 HOURS LATER | REVIEW
Bristol City Centre
Fri 6 Sept
Our team of eight prepared itself to run the night time gauntlet along zombie-infected streets by wearing loose-fitting day glo running gear and face paint. We limbered up at the meeting point on the fourth floor of a car park somewhere in Bristol and were passed as uninfected.
We were given a map and told that we could get to the asylum if we followed the advice given to us by people out on the street. All seemed well but then we were asked for papers by some stern Home Office official. Nobody told us about papers, so on top of avoiding the living dead we now knew that the Police would be looking to lock us up!
We tried to do a deal for papers in a vacant retail unit but one of the team got caught and infected. We were scared out of our minds and so decided to run as fast as we could… Over the next two hours the rest of the team got through the city’s poorly-lit backstreets to the asylum unscathed. On the way we met people who tried to swap information for favours; most were helpful but some tricked us with their sob stories and turned out to be zombies themselves. Just before the end we got let through a tunnel under a railway and were faced with three different paths to take to sanctuary: carnage.
It became clear just how few people had survived when we got to the asylum in an old warehouse. The DJ organised a dance-off between the survivors and the infected. We survivors were easily outnumbered by a more coordinated group who beat us with their jerky zombie dance moves.
The asylum was a good place to relax after this harrowing experience and the secret zombie cocktails were good reward for sticking to the advice of staying sober. In fact we learned that two people had suffered falls in the streets that night and that the organisers had worked hard to get roads closed and negotiate with different land owners for the different sites.
The whole experience was great fun and the actors who played Police officers and dodgy dealers were great, but you could tell that the original concept had been watered down to keep the experience safe. We learned that the previous year’s scenes involving church yards and big buildings had been removed and that it was more a question of how fast you could run, rather than dodging zombies in tight situations. For this reason our group gave it 6/10
Although 2.8 Hours Later has been an gone in Wales you can still get a bit of the Zombie action in London Thurs 18 – Sat 2 Nov. Info: www.8hourslater.com / 01179 304 516
words: ALED SINGLETON
