Theatre Restaurant Hell

Photos by God of War

There are three theatre restaurants that we are aware of in Melbourne: Witches and Britches, Draculas and Hunchbax. We have always been secretly curious about exactly what happens there so decided that we would check out all three and compare them in terms of scariness and quality of stage show. We decided that our friend’s son’s thirteenth birthday would be a good night to start. As it happens, it was unbearably horrible and we ended the experiment half-way through the first night. Birthday boy Blake was so appalled with the whole thing that he wrote us an article about it. The night at Hunchbax started off—as the whole night was—ultra crappy. We firstly walked into a wack horror show bar room consisting of many dodgy looking paper mashay demons and other wack things that looked like a baby had gone to this very restaurant and poured the craptacular food into a bucket and fed it to the dog and the dog had made it. The other annoying thing about this crappy room was the seal covered in sequins. How is that scary? Just as I thought the night was lost, they announced that we would be taking the Cylinder Of Death ride to the catacombs to see the show and eat the dinner. Even though I knew it was only a circular room that people spin around, the excitement was quickly smashed into a million pieces when Woody, the head actor, came and announced that it was totally screwed and couldn’t be ridden anymore. We then took the side entrance around to the catacombs and entered the dodgy hall, which was even slightly dodgier than the first room. The spider on the wall, which was described on the website as being “as big as a car” was actually slightly smaller than a large dog. There was a quick show from the head actors Woody and Chuck, which consisted of very dodgy and annoying jokes while somehow also announcing the main course menu for the night. Dinner was ranktacular and the dessert was horrible so we decided to leave. But that wasn’t quite the end of the night. We quickly hailed a taxi as one of our friends went back in to grab the photos that had been taken off us when we entered the place. They chased us out but we took off in a taxi. There were five of us in a four person cab and when we were about five blocks from home, a cop car pulled up next to us at a red light. I quickly ducked and they luckily had not seen us and we got away. The scare factor for this dodgy restaurant was craptacular and only reached that because of the scariness of the food and the taxi trip. But if you want a crap night that will break your brain and make you feel sick for the whole night, go to Hunchbax. BLAKE RICHARDSON-GRAY