ren fest returns

Texas Renaissance Festival calls Houston lords and ladies to mead up for ale, performances, and more

Barbarian Bombshells Texas Renaissance Festival

The Barbarian Bombshells perform four times each day.

Photo by Caleb Pickens via The Barbarian Bombshells/Facebook

Lords and ladies — and fans of mead: guess what’s back?

The Texas Renaissance Festival has officially opened its doors for the 49th season, welcoming people of all ages to come experience the magic of the nation’s largest and most acclaimed festival of food, fun, and immersive Renaissance experiences. Located one hour north of Houston, the festival takes place over eight themed weekends, running now through Sunday, November 26.

More than 51,000 people attended last week’s opening weekend celebration of The Queen’s Birthday — that’s 33 percent higher attendance than last year’s opening weekend and 43 percent higher than 2021. TRF expects to welcome more than half a million visitors to this year’s event.

The festival’s 55-acre Renaissance village transports visitors to a fantasy world of jugglers, bards, acrobats, games, rides, restaurants, pub crawls, and more than 400 shoppes and artisans. With 21 stages, The King’s Feast, contests and themed celebrations each weekend, there is something for everyone. Parents get free admission for children five and under every Saturday and kids 12 and under every Sunday.

This year’s festival will also host two Deaf Awareness Weekends: this Saturday and Sunday (aka the Weekend of 1001 Dreams) and November 18-19 (for Highland Fling Weekend). These weekends will feature American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters at dozens of shows and events taking place.

“It has been our honor to host Deaf Awareness events every year since 2015, to celebrate diversity and create more inclusive and accessible festival experiences for our deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing patrons,” said Todd Wold, marketing director for the Texas Renaissance Festival.

Here is a full list of Ren Fest's themed weekends, per the lords at Ren Fest.

Oct. 14-15: 1001 Dreams
This weekend is devoted to fairies, elves, and other fanciful. Attendees may participate in the fantasy costume contest or show off their skills in the fiery dragon-wing eating contest. As noted above, this weekend is also a Deaf Awareness weekend featuring American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters for Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing patrons.

Oct. 21-22: Pirate Adventure
This weekend features a Best Dressed Pirate costume contest and a Fish-N-Chips eating contest.

Oct. 28-29: All Hallows Eve
Extra ghouls and ghosts will appear throughout the grounds. Attendees may participate in a Halloween costume contest and Kettle Korn eating contest — both for “spook-tacular” prizes.

Nov. 4-5: Heroes and Villains
Indulge in creative anachronisms at this weekend devoted to heroes and villains both real and fictional from across time. Does that mean Hercules versus Thanos in this weekend's costume content? Maybe. Or they'll square off in the gyro eating contest.

Nov. 11-12: Barbarian Invasion
Feasting and plundering will be featured as attendees compete in the worst dressed barbarian and a turkey leg eating contest.

Nov. 18-19: Highland Fling
If it's not Scottish, it's crap at this weekend that features Highland games, a Bonnie Knees costume contest, and a haggis eating contest (recitation of Robert Burns strongly encouraged). This is also a Deaf Awareness weekend featuring American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters for Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing patrons.

Nov. 24-26: Celtic Christmas
As always, the event wraps up with a three-day celebration of the coming Yule-tide season. The entire village is decorated for the holiday with festive music, a costume contest, a pumpkin pie eating contest, and a chance to shop the vendors at a discount.

Stay and Play:
More than 200 acres of camping facilities offer a great value for patrons and families who spend the weekend. New Stay and Play packages that offer a great value for patrons and families who stay for the weekend. They include:

Festival admission for both Saturday and Sunday
Weekend camping pass (Thursday to Monday) at the Fields of New Market
Access to special Fields of New Market events, including fun activities for kids at the Apprentice Gazebo
Excitement for adults with admission to The Knight’s Club after hours party (age 21+).

The Texas Renaissance Festival has established daily capacity limits to ensure that every patron experiences the festival at its best, so advance ticket purchases are advised.

For more info and tickets, go here.

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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