Coaster Kingdom  Chessington WOA  Forbidden Tomb Our Thoughts

Forbidden Tomb’s pre-cursor had somewhat of cult following. The Fifth Dimension was a cheap, yet effective jaunt through the adventures of a video repair robot’s continuing mishaps. It would always be a shame to see it go, but it was dated and didn’t fit in with Chessington World of Adventures’ future plans for the area.

The ride spent the 1993 season surrounded in fencing, through which you could see parts of the sets removed. The building would remain though, so too would the actual ride system itself. The tin hut appearance of the building was covered up using an Egyptian tomb façade consisting of the arduous use of sprayed cement and Egyptian themed murals on the walls, and the inside was to be completely re-themed so as to resemble a tomb, haunted by the spirits of mummified Egyptians, ghouls and beasts.

The Huss Top Spin, Rameses Revenge, finally finished off the area and so Forbidden Kingdom was born. You enter past the said spin ride towards the un-missable Forbidden Tomb. No real effort has been made to hide the fact that this is a huge building. It is a tomb after all, they’re cavernous inside, and dressed up to look vast from the outside.

The entrance is guarded by two feline guards with steps disappearing into the darkness off to the left. To your right, rope bridges straddle the stretch between various parts of the well themed exterior, and canopy covered walk ways stretch around the far wall.

The steps up to the first level of the queue line are steep, and you are then taken over the bridges, cleverly made to look like rope bridges, which in reality are more rigid than the Millennium Bridge over the Thames could ever be. Below you, a courtyard, surrounded in various eateries and shops. People mingle among the sand stone themed walls and the waterfall cascading from the skull carved into the wall.

The queue goes around the back of this courtyard before heading back towards where you entered the queue and going down some covered steps before entering the tomb. A typical, and rather well themed bazaar with pots of jewels spilling onto the canvas-covered table greets you. Behind the table, Ab-Dab snoozes in his ticket office, offering tours of the tomb.

You pass the snoring Ab-Dab, and climb some stairs into a small corridor. To your right, a bottomless excavation, or so it seems, using the age-old system of one-way mirrors. More stairs before you queue behind an automatic door.

Every so often, the door slides open allowing a trainload of adventurers into the station. The light here is gloomy, the walls adorned in festive hieroglyphics and, overlooking the polystyrene tiled ceiling, the theming here is up to Chessington’s usual, to be expected standard.

The train is around eight carriages long. Each carriage is a six-seater car, seating three in the front row, three in the back. As the train leaves, a faint groaning noise crescendos as skulls in the wall light up. As you round the corner into the darkness, the lap bars come down.

Your friend and mine, Ab-Dab, is now wide-awake. As he leans over some ruins, he angrily shakes a lantern, shouting and cursing that the emerald is his. This first encounter pretty much bodes for the rest of the ride. The animatronics are dated and have the elegance of a JCB, the hissing and clicking can even be heard over the dulcet tones of the angry tour-guide.

In a somewhat unreliable effect, over the decaying and crumbling archways formed above you deeper inside this cursed tomb, an Indiana Jones style boulder crashes down from the ceiling running above your tender skull bouncing between the broken gaps in the masonry. More often than not, whilst the deep rumble will come thundering over you, the boulder however won’t.

Ab-Dab is less than welcoming upon your arrival at the next vault. The pit below you is veritably heaving with snakes, slithering and pouring from the back of the pit, upon which from a podium far out of the way, Ab-Dab pulls open the entrance from which these reptiles pour.

Hidden by the wall around this misty and vapour filled hollow, snakes intermittently jump up behind foliage staring adventurers in the face. It may make you jump, but the trick wears thin after around four encounters with the said reptiles.

Between this and the next tomb, a fragmenting wall plays host to even more concealed constrictors. They wriggle and writhe from behind ivy, hiding gaps and cracks in the wall.

Ab-Dab is again in the next crypt. Rope-sprung spikes made of thick, aging wood, topped by sharp spikes are being pulled back in anticipation for our arrival. Skulls from not so lucky and more so naïve adventurers top these spikes as a morbid hint of what could soon be our grisly downfall. As the train stops, and the animatronic hissing of Ab-Dab echoes around this cavernous chamber, the not-so munificent tour guide warns that his next trick will finish us: he is going to spike us.

The next twist is like something out of Scooby Do: upon pulling the plunger set into the floor, which the beastly Ab-Dab assumes to operate the spikes, the wall spins around, swallows him up and then the lights dim to show the hapless adventurer presumably find the emerald inside a stone coffin.

In a fit of rather annoying screams, he loses balance, falls in, and a living mummified ghoul soon closes the lid behind him, clutching the emerald that Ab-Dab so intently seeks. Oops.

We move onto the next crypt, by far the most impressive. Anibus, a gargantuan man come beast combo squats upon a cracked bed of flaming lava. The head of this stone-formed creature slowly turns, eyes brightly lighting the hazy atmosphere. Anubis crouches, a hand resting on its knee, and on his hand, a ring holding the emerald. Upon a column Ab-Dab continues to dig his proverbial grave deeper. As the column crumbles under his weight, it swaying to and fro, Ab-Dab reaches, in vein, for the emerald.

The track now straightens and passes through the age-old trick of the revolving tunnel. Being a long train, the effect really isn’t felt unless you’re in the front, and soon after this, you turn to the right, passing some chanting statuettes, before coming to a stop.

This certainly is not a dead and decaying crypt de-void of any life. Here, as you enter past the chanting skulls on the wall, the room explodes into life with hard rock guitar music. Squirming in the middle is Ab-Dab, held fast with leather straps inside an open coffin.

To the left, ‘spookettes’ dance in time to the music, clad in ripped and ragged bandages, in the centre above Ab-Dab are tubes of bubbling water lit with an orange glow, organ-pipes come to life, tongues coming out of their faces and on the right, upon a high podium, the lead guitarist.

Although more alive than most of the tomb, the guitarist is hardly a living example to the effects of anti-aging cream with a couple of wisps of hair upon his skull-like head, a Tutan-Karmen style blue and gold collar, with an electric guitar clasped in his skeletal hands.

After this impromptu ‘gig’ from the spokettes, a few harsh words are thrown at the helpless Ab-Dab: “You dare try and steel the emerald, now you too shall become a ghoul!”.

The music continues, climaxing as the spiked coffin begins to lift up and close, Ab-Dab making every effort to writhe his way out of his latest predicament. As the coffin shuts, Ab-Dab screams as the lights dim, and the emerald lights up on the front of the coffin.

Through a pitch-black corridor now, the final strum from the spookettes’ session can still be heard through the darkened chambers before crashing out of the darkness, towards the train some mummies jump out. This normally gets screams from all around, before you pass Ab-Dab one final time, and in a final twist, as a ghoul, clutching the emerald, Ab-Dab gloats that he told us that we would never get the stone.

At this point, holes punctured from the coffin glow red, Ab-Dab looks even more drab than usual and has become one of the ghouls. As various beings circle above you, the train comes to a halt before you leave the cursed building, past a hole in the wall demanding you to face the challenge. Kids go to grab the emerald deep inside this recess, and are surprised by air blowing on their hands. Excited children at this point can be by-passed down a ramp before you are out in the courtyard surrounded in the queue line.

The ride has a rather shambled reputation and most people share an equal hatred of it. It really replaces one dated ride with another, and although a few scenes are great (the one with Anibus springs to mind here), most are really laughably cheesy.

The scene where miserable Ab-Dab falls into the coffin is just appaling and like something out of the original series of Batman and Robin. The snake effects are, in places, good, but the effect where they are supposedly pouring out of the chamber is rather shocking in that they are clearly rubber snakes on a revolving drum.

The ride certainly redeems itself with the Anibus scene, and with the set where the mummies jump out at you, and as this was a later addition to the ride, comes as a real surprise to those who thought they might know the ride off by heart. It goes back into the realms of public toilets though with the hard-rock scene, a scene that is tacky, annoying, and accompanied by screechy, passé music that was far too loud.

The ride is a great change from haunted houses, but the whole story is rather shabby, and whilst some of the theming is truly fantastic, some is pretty amateur. The trains are also quite annoying, you never really get the feeling of being all alone on an adventure, just going around with a group of theme park visitors.

It had real potential, but unfortunately fell by the wayside.

Marcus Sheen

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