With a little more depravity, Vacancy, the bare-bones, derivative motel-owned-by-a-psycho film could be one of those grindhouse films that Quentin Tarantino remembers fondly.
It has that kind of stupid energy, unhindered by logic, and it does eschew some of the more by-the-numbers crap you see in corporate horror films today. Example: The psychos here are not unstoppable killing machines who get up again after you stab them to death, just so there's one more chase to fill in that last reel.
In fact, last reel be damned. Having pressed all the voyeuristic buttons it's allowed for its rating, Vacancy just stops. Even for a horror film it's short, leaving you looking at your watch and saying, "Yeah! I still have time to go home and catch 24."
But really, how much time do you need to convey the important message that when your marriage is in trouble, you're much better off being chased by psychopaths than going to a marriage counsellor? And anyway, how many hours of frantic action do you expect to squeeze out of a story that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a motel room? As if having studied Hitchcock For Dummies, director Nimrod Antal does a serviceable job gleaning claustrophobic shudders out of this setpiece.
Vacancy opens in a car with Amy and David Fox, a couple whose body language (and dialogue) reads "we can't stand each other." She's just woken up in the wee hours to find her husband has taken a detour off the Interstate en route to her mother's, they're lost and the car is making noises. That alone would strain most marriages, but there's also some baggage about a dead child.
It's a bit redundant to recap the plot, since the commercials and trailers for Vacancy pretty much give it all away. Suffice to say, they break down and wind up at the decrepit Pinewood Motel run by Mason, a greasy nerd straight out of central casting (Frank Whaley). Clearly, nothing about our couple's circumstance is supposed to be a surprise. When they show up, Mason comes from the back where he's apparently watching a movie in which a woman is screaming. As they leave his office, his malevolent leer, straight out of a silent movie, follows them. Vacancy doesn't so much telegraph what's coming as hit you over the head with it.
As you may know from the trailers, the room turns out to be full of cameras, and they discover VHS tapes of people being murdered in the room (although it's presented relatively tamely considering the subject matter).
The first order of business in a situation like that might be to get out of that motel room. And they do, on a number of occasions, but always end up being scared back into it -- as if it's the safest place to be. It's the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. I'm thinking, unless these guys are mutant bat-people with night-vision, the nearby woods would be a safe bet. But no, they keep running back into that scary room to be terrorized anew.
Again, this falls short of After Dark Video-worthy depravity. The violence is fairly bloodless -- though Beckinsale is brutalized enough to earn Vacancy the misogynist stripes it needs to uphold the tradition of its genre.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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