Friday evening found me heading up to an industrial estate in Aintree to experience Contained’s offering of their main attraction Motel Sin and the add on attraction of Pitch Black: The Final Sin. Contained is a bit hard to find and theming at the event is sparse, though I think this is more due to restrictions from the landlord rather than a lack of effort from the organisers. I arrived nice and early as I had another event to attend afterwards.
As the queue built up they sent in the clowns to entertain us in the queue line. Bozo and Git were awesome, and Git is properly mental. They were superb fun as we waited in the small covered section waiting for the event to start. They really knew how to work the crowd well. A bit later myself and two younger sisters were promptly ushered towards the entrance.
The Attractions
Motel Sin
The groups sizes at Contained are nicely small and it really works well at this type of attraction, ensuring everyone gets the full experience, and what a fun experience it is. The small groups are batched in every four to five minutes and since this is a series of set piece rooms you’ll never see any other attendees other than your group, however you may well hear them in this 30-minute experience.
From their website – “The event features VERY bad language, Adult & sexual themes, and scenes that some viewers made find disturbing and offensive. If this event was a movie, it would have a government rating of 15 due to its content, So, please take this into consideration before booking.” This is very true from the start so it’s not a traditional family-friendly Halloween event.
What Contained is though is a huge amount of fun. As you can guess from the title, Motel Sin. This is a twisted motel attraction themed around the seven deadly sins. You are led through a series of themed rooms in the motel and in each room you have a brief theatrical scene and a variety of jump scares, animatronics, effects and creepy elements. Smells are used extensively throughout. You are encouraged, but not forced to eat and lick some gross things, you may be restrained, touched, moved around and end up getting closer to your fellow participants than you may expect.
The small groups work very well and it gives each of the scenes a very personal feel and ensures you get the full impact of the attraction. The actors were superb, clearly relishing their parts and working the room and small group to great effect. As a smaller attraction Contained has a lot of charm and some great set pieces, Well worth it on it’s own.
Pitch Black
New for this year is Pitch Black: The Final Sin available for an extra charge. This is a blindfolded live actor binaural headphone 15-minute experience. You’re led blindfolded on to a seat and have your hands restrained. Love Honey must be doing a roaring trade with this event. You’re introduced to a deranged hillbilly family and suffer at their mercy as you experience being touched, sprayed liberally with liquids involving two bodily fluids and some truly disgusting smells applied under your nose as the scene plays out over the audio. Another fun event though I think the smells will stay with me for a while, triggering the memories. I felt that this was a worthwhile add on.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed my time at Contained. It’s a much smaller event, but if the outskirts of Liverpool are within you’re reach I’d highly recommend going along. The whole more adult oriented event, shows a lot of charm and passion from the team behind it and the actors within the Motel.
Contained: Motel Sin runs on select dates through to 2nd November.
