Vacancy

Starring: Luke Wilson, Kate Beckinsale, Frank Whaley, and Ethan Embry

Written by: Mark L. Smith

Directed by (and I kid you not): Nimrod Antal

I picked up Vacancy on DVD because I have to admit to being a horror/suspense junkie. Even bad horror usually ends up entertaining me and unlike some genres, I’ll almost always give a film in this genre a chance.

That being said, I can’t remember the last time I was so bored by a horror film. There is absolutely nothing new in this movie. It is as tired as Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale’s performances. At least Beckinsale’s character is on a zoloft cocktail so I can forgive her for acting spacey.

It starts out promising enough. Wilson and Beckinsale are a married couple heading for divorce. Their young child, Charlie died in an accident sometime back and it seems it all went downhill from there. If the filmmaker was being purposefully vague throughout the movie on both the relationship and about Charlie, than he certainly succeeded. It would be an interesting choice but it seemed more like sloppy writing than anything else. It didn’t let us fully connect with the characters and left us wanting more. This could have worked if he also chose to commit fully to another choice I’ll get into in a moment.

When their car breaks down, the couple are forced to spend the night at a fleabag of a motel. The most intriguing concept of the film comes next. When Luke Wilson decides to watch the TV, it doesn’t work forcing him to check out the tapes on top of the VCR. He pops in what he thinks is a horror movie as he watches people hacking up young screaming girls.

It is then that he realizes the scene he’s watching was filmed in the very room he is using. He quickly checks the vents and sees the cameras placed there. Now that is a good horror-movie moment. Luke realizes he’s about to be part of someone’s snuff film.

It all goes south to lazy, tiring, mediocrity. One interesting way they could have played it (and this is what I was mentioning earlier), is if they chose to have the audience view the whole thing as Luke viewed the snuff film on the VCR. We see nothing but filmed shots of Luke and Kate the entire movie and our view never veers off of them. We never see what the bad guys are doing, we can only see Luke and Kate’s reactions. THAT would give us reason to not delve more further into their back story because quite simply, the snuff viewer wouldn’t get any more of their back story either.

But it doesn’t go that route. Too often we shift focus to the bad guys (wearing masks like they’re Michael Myers. They aren’t. Believe me.) or the cop who gets killed for investigating, yet when the next morning 911 call is made again, it’s obvious that the sheriff doesn’t care that the guy he sent out there hasn’t checked back in since going there.

The rest of the film is poor acting, poor action sequences, and sheer boredom. Maybe I’ve seen too many horror films…but I don’t think so. I think that the filmmaker might have and just didn’t have it within him to try something new and exciting…

The one positive I can think of is that it has Ethan Embry in it…whom I’ve been fond of since Can’t Hardly Wait. It’s sad to see how far he’s fallen.

D