Jason Bracelin | Las Vegas Review-Journal (TNS)

LAS VEGAS — Just what are Vegas’ most haunting haunts?

Fair question, fright fans, and we’re here with the answers.

If you’re down for some clown-inspired scares, a visit to the city’s most macabre shop or just a good ol’ fashioned slice of “Murder Pizza,” here’s your guide to five of Vegas’ creepiest visits.

Items found from the home featured in the documentary “Demon House” are displayed in Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum. (Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

Zak Bagans’ The Haunted Museum

He calls it a hostel for the afterlife.

Zak Bagans is on the screen, introducing the grisly, guided tour through his Haunted Museum (600 E. Charleston Blvd.).

Right hand in the air, the experience begins with a pledge, which we recite in unison: “This building is known to contain ghosts, spirits and cursed objects. By entering we agree that management will not be liable for any action by these unseen forces.”

Seem like a bit much?

Well, wait until you get an eyeful of a real-life severed head or Ted Bundy’s ice pick or the original wooden staircase from the “Demon House” in Gary, Indiana.

If you don’t have a stomach encased in iron and/or a Pepto Bismol I.V. drip handy, chances are that this truly unsettling journey will get your gut churning at some point.

Exploring over 30 rooms in this ornate, labyrinthine, 13,000 square-foot property originally built in 1938, we confront a mix of real-life horrors — a recreation of Robert Berdella’s torture chamber just might be the most disturbing thing we’ve ever witnessed — and the supernatural, from recordings of exorcisms to an encounter the Dybbuk Box, which some consider to be the world’s most haunted object.

You’ll see Jack Kevorkian’s Volkswagon van, where he assisted in hundreds of suicides, the shovel that Ed Gein used to dig up women’s corpses and maybe get a jump scare or two from a creepy clown — really, is there any other kind?

At two hours, this tour will test your mettle for the macabre.

Taxidermy items on display at Cemetery Pulp, a shop of oddities, comics and more, on Nov. 17, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Chase Stevens/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

Cemetery Pulp

“Welcome to the Creepshow,” reads a small, foldable sign on the sidewalk out front, “a wondrous place where we will put your kidney in a jar and unattended children will be taught how to taxidermy the dog.”

That’s a fitting introduction to arguably Las Vegas’ most atypical store: Cemetery Pulp (3950 Sunset Road), the city’s first — and most likely only — combination oddities/comic book shop.

It’s the city’s self-anointed “home for the weird and nerdy.”

Oh, and the dead.

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There’s lots and lots of dead stuff here amid the Vincent Price air fresheners, spinal cord candles, gleaming silver dental hammers (ouchy!), tomes like “199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die,” ornate crosses (inverted, of course). Here, you’ll encounter enough taxidermied wildlife mounts to decorate a half-dozen hunting lodges and myriad stuffed animals in anthropomorphic poses — Leering possum in a pink baby doll dress? Check. Tiara-sporting raccoon gripping a crucifix of bones? As if you have to ask. — alongside jars of embalmed rodents and luminous diaphanized snakes translucent in the light.

Additionally, there are near-weekly classes on how to pin everything from tarantulas to beetles to moths, as well as Dungeons and Dragons sessions, tarot card readings, concerts and the stray round-table discussion with morticians.

All in all, it’s quite the lively place — you know, considering all the dead stuff.

Justin Abundo, technical director of Escape IT, stands on the set of Three Doors at Escape It, on April 11, 2023, in Las Vegas. (Chitose Suzuki/Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

Escape It

“Where are you?”

A clown’s disembodied voice soundtracks our journey, singsongy and sinister at once, a lullaby with teeth.

A decrepit-looking house looms amid the fog, its weathered facade suggestive of rot and decay.

It’s a life-sized totem of death.

Said house is where Pennywise lives, sleeps and feasts on stray children in the smash horror franchise “It.”

It’s re-created with such minute attention to detail here at the Escape It (273 S. Martin Luther King Blvd.), a hybrid escape room/haunted house/immersive fright attraction, that it feels like we’ve been transported to the outskirts of Derry, Maine, where “It” is set.

This is one of many clowns featured in Escape It on April 11, 2023, in Las Vegas. (Chitose Suzuki/Las Vegas Review-Journal//TNS)

At 31,000 square feet, with over 20 interactive rooms set in a mammoth warehouse owned by Walker’s Furniture next door, the place is almost as big as the $1.1 billion worldwide box-office receipts for the films it’s based on, “It Chapter 1” and “It Chapter 2,” with each installment of the series featured in a separate attraction here.

You’ll traverse sewers, and abattoirs — complete with slaughterhouse smells, naturally — dank garages and much, much more, with most rooms featuring a puzzle to be solved, which can be an especially challenging task to complete with jangled nerves.

The complex also features a collection of “It” memorabilia, culled from the Warner Bros. archives.

To borrow a line from Pennywise himself, that’s a whole lot of “tasty, tasty, beautiful fear.”

Army of the Dead

The zombie tiger beckons.

Missing an eye, looking like one of Siegfried and Roy’s massive cats given an acid bath, the towering, fabricated creature looms in the lobby of the Army of the Dead VR experience at Area15 (3215 S. Rancho Dr.) as a harbinger of things to come.

But first, our guide gives us some marching orders before the games begin.

“Shoot them in the face before they eat your face,” he commands.

Got it.

Army of Dead is based on 2o21 Netflix horror flick of the same name, which opens with some truly gnarly scenes of Vegas getting ravaged and savaged by zombie Elvis impersonators, undead showgirls and more in a geyser of gore like Old Faithful spewing blood and entrails in place of water and steam.

It’s in this landscape that the experience takes place.

The action begins when players board the Las Vengeance Tactical Taco Truck, where — VR headset on, gun in hands — we travel down a decimated Strip and wage war on fast-charging brain eaters.

We pass an MGM Grand reduced to rubble, get chased by a spear-hurling zombie riding a horse and, yes, encounter the aforementioned tiger.

Gotta say, blasting seemingly unending hordes of the living dead really works up the appetite.

Speaking of which…

A menu is seen at Sliced Pizza, on May 8, 2022, in Las Vegas. (Chitose Suzuki / Las Vegas Review-Journal/TNS)

Sliced

Freddy Krueger’s on the TV, “Murder Pie” is on the menu.

As horror flicks play on the big screen behind the counter, “Forbidden Fried Pickles” and “Haunting Jalapeno Poppers” serve as appetizers for those with a taste for blood, guts and pizza.

Here at Sliced (2129 S. Industrial Road), Vegas’ eeriest eatery, there are offerings named after ax murderers (the Voorhees BBQ Chicken Pizza), chainsaw murderers (the Leatherface Meat Pizza) serial murderers (the Buffalo Bill Chicken Pizza) and more, all of them featuring Sliced’s signature black crust, which, as we all know, is way, way more evil than the plain ‘ol dough from those scaredy cats at Pizza Hut.

For horror fans, this place is worth visiting even if you’re not hungry: it’s like a mini-museum of the macabre, with Art the Clown from “Terrifier” manning the DJ booth, life-size werewolves, a pair of nasty little buggers from ’80s cult classic “Ghoulies,” and more, along with a few arcade games, including “Alien” pinball.

If you do dine in, make sure to save room for dessert: the “Killer Cannoli” and “Terror Misu” are to die for — perhaps literally.

©2024 Las Vegas Review-Journal. Visit reviewjournal.com.. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Widespread cannabis dispensaries are one step closer to reality after the Minnesota Legislature at the end of session approved a bill speeding up the process for licensing.

Before the bill passed in the final weekend of the session, a bipartisan House-Senate panel settled on a licensing preapproval process for entrepreneurs to apply without having a retail or business space. People who have faced past harms because of the over-prosecution of marijuana laws, known as “social equity applicants,” also get priority and early approval for those licenses.

However, Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, the only Republican lawmaker on the joint committee, told MPR News on earlier this week that the lack of a property requirement and shifting from a merit-based to a lottery-based system to award licenses are among his top concerns. West voted against the agreement.

Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine. (Courtesy of the candidate)

“By that very nature, it’s all minimum standards, and basically, luck of the draw,” West said. “And without a property requirement, it’s very easy for people to game the system, because you can do a lot of applications under a lot of names, especially if you don’t have to have a piece of property attached to each one of those applications.”

Regulators have said the lottery will help get around potential litigation that has slowed the implementation of cannabis business licensing in other states.

Stricter rules

The conference committee did approve stricter rules and anti-predatory language to ensure the people applying for licenses are truly the ones who would run the business, as well as disclosure of each person’s percentage of ownership.

It also added a cap on the number of licenses.

There have been issues in other states that rolled out social equity licenses where those applicants who can’t get enough capital to sustain their business are forced to give up their share to investors — in essence, those larger, richer companies “rent a minority.”

In a use-it-or-lose-it provision, applicants who secure a license don’t have to utilize it for 18 months. That lack of urgency concerns West if Minnesota plans to stick to a timeline of getting the legal marijuana industry up and running in 2025.

An industry in its infancy

Earlier this month, Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville told MPR News the “legalized and regulated industry is in its infancy, and we’re here to continue the work we started last year. Like any new industry, it will not be fully grown on day one. This bill works to ensure a successful market launch and support the industry and Minnesotans involved in this industry as it grows and develops.”

Sen. Lindsey Port, DFL-Burnsville.  (Courtesy of the Minnesota Senate)

Regarding social equity applicants, West is “against the concept as a whole because it’s fundamentally unfair.”

He added, “I do support people who are convicted of a cannabis offense getting special treatment because they got the raw end of the deal. But just saying you live somewhere and you get special treatment — that doesn’t sit right with me.”

West said he was pleased that the definition of social equity applicants now extends to military veterans.

As for being the sole GOP member of the conference committee, West says he was working in “good faith” and likely had “more influence than probably any Republican in the entire Legislature” on marijuana law, but is still disappointed by the lack of inclusion of his caucus’ perspective.

The final bill also includes $2.73 million for the Office of Cannabis Management for product testing and enforcement and provides cannabis patients and their caregivers more freedom around possessing plants.

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Without permits, caution or anything to prove except everything, director George Miller shot “Mad Max” in 1977 on some beautifully forlorn stretches of Australian road with an ensemble of eager maniacs activating, and hyperactivating, a tale of a desolate near-future. At one point, a very young Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, the road warrior-lawman on the edge of insanity, mourns the killing of his boss and comrade. “He was so full of living, you know?” he says, fighting back tears in the super-healthy guy way. “He ran the franchise on it.”

Forty-six years of rough road later, here we are at the fifth “Mad Max” movie. Now 79, Miller remains an action fantasist of the highest order and has become the spiritual if very-much-alive cousin of the eulogized character in his first smash hit. (Its budget was $350,000, roughly $1.5 million in 2024 dollars.) “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is a prequel to 2015’s lavishly nutty “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and is the work of a director full of living, albeit guided by an ever-darker vision of humankind barreling toward the cliff. He has run the franchise on it.

I’ll try to explain why I’m all over the highway on “Furiosa,” even as I’m recommending it. The best of it is spectacular, tapping into so many different ways to create and assemble images in contemporary big-budget filmmaking, you can barely keep track.

The story belongs to Furiosa, who we meet as a young girl played by Alyla Browne. In the barely human patriarchies of this parched post-apocalypse desert land, only the Vuvalini, aka the Tribe of Many Mothers, living in the Edenic paradise known as the Green Place, point to a better way.

The optimism lasts about 45 seconds in movie terms. Right off, Furiosa is abducted by the snarling, drooling Biker Horde, ruled by Dr. Dementus. This is the major new character; he’s played by Chris Hemsworth, who has most of the screenplay’s verbiage for better or worse. Visually, the character borrows Charlton Heston’s nose, Heston’s “Ben-Hur” chariot (pulled here by three tricked-up motorcycles; the vehicles in the “Mad Max” universe remain unbeatably weird and fantastically convincing), and Heston’s “Ten Commandments” beard.

“Furiosa” is actually pretty light on narrative, as written by director Miller and “Fury Road” co-writer Nick Lathouris. The crafty survival machine of the title meets a series of grueling, generally sadistic circumstances. Both Dementus, a nattering, twisted father figure of a psycho, and his sometime enemy, Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme, taking over for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne) have uses for Furiosa. She knows the location of the Green Place, though the miseries she has survived, painfully, and the rage in her heart, renders her mute for years. Even as a young adult, once Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role an hour into the picture, Furiosa has little use for words.

There’s world-building aplenty. One fiefdom, The Citadel, resembles a sand-swept Middle-earth, or the Tower of Babel’s ambitious new condo development. Dementus cuts a deal with his enemy and gains control of nearby Gastown. The realms of “Fury Road” and now “Furiosa,” like their “Mad Max” franchise predecessors, run on petroleum (scarce), water (scarcer) and blood (spilling constantly, corpses and vivisected limbs strewn all over the desert).

A chase scene from director George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” (Warner Bros. Pictures)

As gratifyingly different as the “Mad Max” movies have been, at heart Miller is making ever-more-grandiose biker movies, but with more than bikes. “Furiosa” lives and breathes righteous retribution, setting her unblinking sights on the pig-men who killed her mother, and who enslave women as harem chattel.

The new film, rather portentously divided into solemn-sounding chapters, covers many years, which marks a change from previous “Mad Max” sagas. More pertinent to the overall viewing experience (mine, at least), “Furiosa” is the grimmest and most deliberately punishing of Miller’s visions. The occasional stabs at black comedy feel a little off. In this awful if fabulously designed near-future, as Dementus’ resident History Man (George Shevtsov, a wizened Shakespearean fool) asks in voiceover, “how must we brave the cruelties?” The movie provides the two hour, 28 minute answer.

The internal tensions within “Furiosa” fill the screen, even when they can’t resolve their contradictory natures. Miller’s not kidding around. He doesn’t like how humankind mistreats its home or degrades the culture with “ridiculous perversions and witty mutilations.” That phrase is actually heard in voiceover here; it’s Miller, and the franchise, having a little fun with the paradox at the center of the “Mad Max” universe. Cheap thrills, beautifully executed, plus some unsettling food for thought: That’s the idea. Beautifully executed cheap thrills without the “unsettling” part are rare enough.

I’ll see “Furiosa” again for many reasons, none purer or more pleasurable than the peak action vignette, a roughly 15-minute chase involving a tanker truck (aka the War Rig), steroidal dune buggies, motorcycles and para-sailing warriors. It’s a wonder, exceeding even the best of “Fury Road.” To their huge credit, Miller and editors Eliot Knapman and Margaret Sixel keep the longer takes of speeding warriors and their flame-throwing weapons of doom flowing, lucidly, excitingly. Yes, there’s considerably more digital futzing going on in “Furiosa,” compared to “Fury Road” (which was hardly all-analog). But Miller’s passionate artifice and eye for detail — including dreamy, digitally rendered sights such as Dementus’s biker army, swarming as one across the desert — are as good as it gets in modern visual effects.

Chris Hemsworth plays the warlord Dr. Dementus in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” (Jasin Boland/Warner Bros. Pictures)

Is the movie fun? Well, Furiosa’s story doesn’t really welcome that word. It’s gripping, even when it’s a bit of a trudge. Miller’s a visual genius. And a pile-driver. He’s also an adult, with a mature master filmmaker’s sensibility and serious intentions to go with his eternal-adolescent love of speed and noise. Budget estimates for Miller’s latest run between $168 million and $233 million, which is a tad more than the $350,000 “Mad Max” had going for it. But some things do not change. Even amid new depths of misery, “Furiosa” still delivers the clean, electrifying, inches-above-asphalt camera perspectives that made the Cinemascope-shot “Mad Max” so arresting nearly two generations ago.

Even if they’re not their own best screenwriters, some directors just know what they’re doing.

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sequences of strong violence, and grisly images)

Running time: 2:28

How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 23

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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