bring the pack

Wildly popular Great Wolf Lodge breaks ground on massive Houston-area indoor water park resort

Great Wolf Lodge is coming to Webster.

Photos courtesy of Great Wolf Lodge

Local families who’ve traveled north on I-45 to take in the joys of Great Wolf Lodge near Dallas are now in luck. The wildly popular, nationwide family resort and indoor park will break ground in nearby Webster, Texas on Thursday, September 22, for what will be its second Texas location.

Great Wolf Lodge Gulf Coast Texas will boast 532 rooms and — importantly for kids and families — a 95,000-square-foot indoor water park and a 58,000-square-foot family entertainment center known as the Great Wolf Adventure Park. The 27-acre destination, located east of the Gulf Freeway near the Flyway at Clear Creek development, is slated to open in mid-to-late 2024, according to Great Wolf Resorts announcement.

“With millions of families visiting our resort in Grapevine, we know Texas families love the Great Wolf Lodge experience and we’re excited to introduce our second resort to the Lone Star State,” said Murray Hennessy, CEO of Great Wolf Resorts. “A hallmark of Great Wolf Lodge is that we help families strengthen their pack by offering a fun-filled getaway that is close, convenient and carefree, and with this new resort, we will be able to better serve families in the Houston area and southeastern portions of the state.”

Accommodating year-round visitors, Great Wolf Lodge Gulf Coast Texas will feature myriad attractions and amenities for all ages, including:

● An expansive, 95,000-square-foot indoor waterpark, heated to a comfortable 84 degrees, featuring a variety of body slides, tube slides, raft rides, activity pools and splash areas for every member of the family – from toddlers and teens to parents and grandparents.

● The aforementioned, 58,000-square-foot family entertainment center known as the Great Wolf Adventure Park. This center will offer a variety of family-friendly attractions, including MagiQuest – Great Wolf Lodge’s exclusive live action-adventure game where players use interactive magic wands to battle goblins and dragons.

● A collection of complimentary family events and activities including Yoga Tails, a morning exercise program that combines tales from the creatures found in the Spirit Water Forest with yoga poses, and evening events such as Great Wolf Lodge’s signature Hustle & Howl dance party and Story Time event.

● Several dining options that will appeal to a variety of culinary styles ranging from pizza and burgers to upscale dining and premium ice cream treats at Wood’s End Creamery.

● Family-friendly suites in a variety of categories and styles including Great Wolf-themed suites with separate sleeping quarters for kids designed as either a log cabin or wolf den and outfitted with bunk beds and Great Wolf character theming. The resort will also feature suites with multiple bedrooms for large families or multi-generational groups.

Area businesses can make use of the destination’s more than 11,000 square feet of flexible conference space with breakout rooms, built-in A/V technology, customizable catering options, and a team of dedicated industry professionals to serve visiting conferences and events.

Aside from a major tourist attraction, Great Wolf Lodge’s new outpost will be a boon for area employment. An estimated 600 construction and trade workers will be on-site each day during the peak of construction. And the resort will fill approximately 500 full and part-time jobs to prepare for the grand opening, with positions including senior management, engineering, IT professionals, lifeguards, guest service agents, housekeepers, and more.

In an effort to seamlessly integrate with the community, the new resort will operate with environmentally friendly practices, including energy usage and water consumption.

Notably, the resort’s location in Webster makes the perfect addition to a weekend jaunt to nearby NASA/Johnson Space Center/Space Center Houston — as well as Galveston.

“Tourism is one of Webster’s top economic drivers,” said Donna Rogers, mayor of the City of Webster, in a statement, “and Great Wolf Lodge is a force multiplier that will attract visitors from a super regional and global market.”

Great Wolf Resorts currently operate across the U.S. and in Canada. The company plans more growth: a Great Wolf Lodge in Perryville, Maryland is scheduled to open summer of 2023 and a location in Naples, Florida just broke ground.

Fans of the howlingly fun resort can stay up to date on developments on the company’s social media channels and on www.greatwolf.com.

Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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