Europe's newest theme park finally opens - but guests aren't happy with rides and ticket prices
Fairytale-themed Hossoland had been due to open in the village of Brojce on Pola nd's northern coast on May 31st - but last-minute delays have seen it lose four vital weeks in the lucrative summer season.
Now though, the doors have officially opened and the verdict is in on the park, which spans 400,000sq m and boasts 50 rides and attractions across four themed lands.
Some have said Hossoland, which centres around a lighthouse and is inspired by local Baltic legends and fairytales, should have been more ambitious - particularly in how many big thrill rides there are.
While Poland's biggest theme park, Energylandia, has 18 rollercoasters, there are just four at Hossoland, with one critic wasping: This is supposed to be competition for Energylandia? 4 rollercoasters?'
Another added: 'But do you plan something more hardcore for adults? Me and my 15-year-old son are waiting impatiently.'
GhostRider, a steel coaster, was set to be one of the park's standout attractions - but that now doesn't seem to be on the menu anytime soon.
The new rollercoaster, which cost several million pounds, was supposed to stretch 53m in the air taking guests on a thrilling ride at speeds of 72mph.
Some griped over the £34 adult entry price, with one saying tickets 'aren't cheap either'.
Others defended the new park, saying that while it appears to be aimed at younger children, new rides were still being built.
There has been plenty of excitement on the park's social media sites too though, with many theme park goers impressed and others saying they're keen to visit this summer.
One person wrote on the park's official Instagram site: 'I was there today I'll say yes... MEGA! I liked the most on the roller coaster in the dragon zone.'
Another added: 'Really one of the most beautiful entrances. Not getting over it. Bravo'.
The four lands include the Dragon Valley of the Mines, the Land of the Vikings, the Kingdom of Baltambrya and Mermaid City.
Karen Hovsepyan, vice president of the park's operator Hosso Group, previously told Planet Attractions: 'Hossoland will be the only amusement park of such a large scale on the Polish coast.
'It will certainly become a recognisable symbol and a frequently visited place in this region.'
It's hoped that the park will soon attract one million tourists per year.
The closest airport to Hoosoland is Szczecin and Brits can book direct flights with Ryanair from both Liverpool and London. Hossoland is then about a one hour drive from the airport.
The park is also under three hours drive from Berlin.
Last week, it was revealed that a former theme park could be transformed into hundreds of homes 15 years after the site was closed and left to rot.
A planning application has been submitted to turn the former Camelot Theme Park in Charnock Richard, Lancashire into 350 homes.
The park closed in 2012 after nearly 30 years and has been empty ever since, aside from occasional use for immersive Halloween events and laser tag.
Story Homes has submitted the application to turn the site into housing, with 50 per cent proposed to be affordable housing for local people, The Bolton News reported.
The homes would include a range of sizes for first-time buyers, families and older couples looking to downsize.
During the height of its popularity, Camelot was one of the north west's most prominent tourist attractions, featuring a range of offerings like the amusement ride Excalibur 2, and hosting live jousting in an arena.
Inspired by the legend of King Arthur, the ill-fated park was boarded up after being open to the public for nearly 30 years.
Owners Knights Leisure said bad weather contributed to low visitor numbers - and so the decision was made to shut the park down, with over 150 staff losing their jobs.
The amusement park was home to the legendary Knightmare roller coaster - the structure of which remained standing tall even after it was shut down and was only dismantled in 2020.
Other famous rides at the medieval-themed park included the Dragon Flyer, Caterpillar Capers, The Galleon and Pendragon's Plunge.
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July and on Mubi from 8 August.
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I call it a nihilist western': director Athina Rachel Tsangari on her trippy folk horror Harvest
A hand emerges from sheaves of wheat waving in the wind. Then we see a face, trying to eat moss on a log, and a tongue searching for liquid in rocks. When Caleb Landry Jones (Dogman, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) fully emerges, his blue cape flows like a toga or a Japanese courtier's cape, close mics capturing every tiny sound – and then exhilarating Romanian prog rock kicks in. Harvest has been described as a folk horror film – one that has sharply divided the critics – but its trippy, haunting opening, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's unfinished book Reveries of the Solitary Walker, introduces something far stranger than that. It's been a 'very personal film' for its genre-hopping Greek new wave director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose previous work includes an avant garde commentary on Greek society (Attenberg), a twisted male friendship comedy (Chevalier) and a BBC Two series about a throuple (Trigonometry). Today, the 59-year-old is presenting a retrospective of her movies at the New Horizons film festival in Poland, where Attenberg won best film in 2011. 'It's full of people in their 20s,' she says, smiling. 'Really hardcore film buffs, who come for 10 days and watch like five, six films a day.' Harvest was a project brought to her by Joslyn Barnes, who was Oscar-nominated this year for the screenplay for US reform school drama Nickel Boys. 'She had a script and a mood board already, so there was a world there. I just needed to figure out how and if I fitted in.' Adapted from Jim Crace's 2013 Man Booker prize-nominated novel of the same name, Harvest tells the story of the descent and destruction of a village over seven days. The cast is made up of local people from Oban in Scotland, where Harvest was filmed, and outsiders slowly enter the fray: two unnamed men who get put into stocks, a woman who is suspected of being a witch (Trigonometry's Thalissa Teixeira), and Quill (Arinzé Kene), a map-maker tasked with charting the land. Tsangari 'completely identified' with two of the lead characters, she says: Walter Thirsk (played by Landry Jones) and Quill. Why? '[Walter is] such a tragic, tragic character. You know, someone who does not really belong and he never will.' And Quill? 'Because he's the artist – his job is to draw and describe and name things. I suppose I was fearing that in the end. As an artist, you are going to be complicit with some kind of system that's going to try to co-opt you, devour you, or employ you to its service.' Two Harry Potter alumni also put in haunting appearances: Harry Melling is the town's weak-willed mayor and Frank Dillane, as his city cousin, arrives with a terrifying Witchfinder General vibe, as well as tall hat. Keen to preserve the novel's peculiar mood, Tsangari turned to her 'treasure trove' of favourite films, she says, including Peter Watkins' 2000 docudrama La Commune (Paris, 1871) and wayward 70s westerns McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Missouri Breaks. She doesn't buy that Harvest is a folk horror. 'It's more pastoral … yes, there is paganism in it, but I've called it a nihilist western.' The passivity of its characters as dread encroaches has a contemporary power, while Crace's setting of the story in an unspecified era – albeit with echoes of the Highland Clearances – adds to its allegorical sheen. 'The last thing I wanted to do was locate it and lodge it in a specific time,' Tsangari says. 'Especially since the dissolution of communities, and the bordering up of land, the ghettoes, are happening literally everywhere now.' This is Tsangari's first full-length film as a director in nearly a decade. Greek cinema is in a dire state, she says. 'There is not enough support by our government, especially after the big exodus Greek cinema has had in this century.' She often worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before he found Hollywood success with The Lobster and The Favourite (she co-produced his Greek-language films Dogtooth and Alps), but says the problems have been longstanding, citing one man as Greek cinema's saviour. '[Producer] Christos V Konstantakopoulos single-handedly financed half of the Greek new wave films. That's actually a fact.' She is now part of Visibility: Zero, a campaign launched with an open letter from nearly 2,000 signatories in June, demanding institutional reform within the Greek arts. Or as Tsangari puts it: 'It's a revolt against the total disregard for the Greek cinema community by our state.' Part of the problem is a cash rebate programme for non-Greek film-makers working in the country, she explains, that has prioritised movies with bigger budgets and squeezed indie productions. 'It's an issue happening more and more in Europe – the whole industry is getting overextended, and then it becomes prohibitive for our very modest films to be made. It's also becoming more and more difficult to make films in my own language.' A few days after we speak, 176 international actors, directors and producers, including Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, signed a letter demanding that the Culture Ministry and the Hellenic Film and Audiovisual Center – Creative Greece take immediate action. But back to Harvest, loved by some critics and hated by others. I ask if Tsangari likes making films that produce extreme reactions. 'I'm not the right person to respond to this,' she says. She doesn't read reviews, she adds, but admits to reading the Guardian's chief film critic Peter Bradshaw's negative take. 'It was the first one … a bit traumatic'. Now she is focusing on travelling, she says, to present the film 'out in the world'. She is much happier talking about the film's epic sound design. The fabulous opening track, by Romanian experimental one-man band Rodion GA, was made on cassette during the culturally punitive rule of Ceaușescu; she tells me excitedly that she got the masters from bandleader Rodion Roșca's daughter. She also loved building up a Harvest Family Band, which included Landry Jones (who is also a musician) and experimental recorder player Laura Cannell, with support from ethnomusicologist Gary West and Gaelic musicians Sarah and Anna Garvin. Sound of Metal's award-winning composer Nicolas Becker and sound engineer David Bowtle-McMillan also bolstered the film's extreme sensory intensity, the latter often using 20 mics at one time, 'buried in the mud, when it was raining, like a Zen Buddha, as if he was mixing jazz,' Tsangari says with a laugh. Whatever your take on it, Harvest is a film that envelops you in its noise, that lingers, that you can't extract yourself from, I say. Tsangari smiles, perhaps with relief. 'That is literally music to my ears!' Harvest is in cinemas on 25 July.
Scottish Sun
a day ago
- Scottish Sun
Star Wars-style FLYING ‘speeder bike' can zoom around skies at over 60mph – and you can pre-order your own in days
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A POLISH start-up has offered us a glimpse at a Star Wars-laden future after launching a remarkable flying bike. The real life 'speeder bike' was first unveiled on 30 April in footage showing it taking off and landing in a wooded area. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 5 The flying bike, from Poland-based startup Volonaut, uses redundant jet turbines Credit: Volonaut 5 A solo passenger can fly through the sky at up to 63mph (102kmph) Credit: YouTube 5 Volonaut has said the bike will be available for pre-order on 1 August Credit: YouTube The video is stripped back, with real sound and no special effects. The company also stresses that no CGI or artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to enhance the footage. That means the days of bikes and cars zooming above our heads is nearly here - with heavy emphasis on the 'nearly'. The flying bike, from Poland-based startup Volonaut, uses redundant jet turbines to beam a solo passenger through the sky at up to 63mph (102kmph). Riders can fly through tight areas with ease due to its lack of spinning propellers, according to Volonaut. Thanks to carbon fiber materials and 3D printing, the Airbike is seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, Volonaut added. The video shows a test pilot heavily cladded in protective gear riding a bike that has so far only existed in sci-fi movies. The aircraft is the brainchild of Polish inventor Tomasz Patan, who is also behind the Jetson One - a type of futuristic air buggy. 5 While Patan's company Jetson continues works on a £68,000 flying car, his second firm Volonaut is working on a separate hoverbike. World's weirdest flying car that splits in HALF so you can fly over traffic - before the wheels drive The Airbike is the first hoverbike to achieve flight without traditional propellers, Volonaut claims on its website. Though riders won't be airborne for long. The Airbike can only hover off the ground for a maximum of 10 minutes at a time. While Volonaut claims the hoverbike takes under 60 seconds to refuel, 10 minutes of air travel even at max speeds won't get you very far. The flight was "exceptionally smooth", according to the startup, "with no vibrations and great degree of control". Volonaut has said the bike will be available for pre-order on 1 August. However, the company has not mentioned a manufacturing or distribution timeline. It has also remained tight-lipped as to the price tag. Therefore, it's unclear just how much money Airbike hopefuls will have to part with - or when the aircraft will arrive at their doorstep if they do. While Volonaut's Airbike has definitely captured interest in personal VTOL innovations, it is interesting to note that, as of this writing, the company has not filed patents.
