May 3 , 2007

This films leaves a ‘Vacancy’ in expectations
Jeremy Kopp
koppj@marietta.edu

I guess the title of this weeks reviewed film is appropriate, given that I will be graduating in a few weeks and 'The Marcolian' will forever more be vacant of my reviews.

Cheesy puns aside, though, I wish I could say I was going-out on a better movie, but I can't. Though 'Vacancy' has a solid start, everything goes awry in the second-act, turning what could have been a respectable psychological-thriller into another third-rate slasher flick.

Late one night, David and Amy Fox (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) are traveling home from a family reunion - despite that their only months away from finalizing their divorce.
They're overly irritable with one another, and the tension grows when their car breaks down and their forced to set up camp in the grimy Pinewood Motel.

At this point in the film, I'm thinking, 'okay: we're off to a good start with characters we care for. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith is taking the time to develop them so we're not going to be subjected to another 'Hostel' or 'Saw.' We're always able to invest more into a film that takes the time to invest into its characters.

But then David and Amy start making very unwise - and sometimes, downright stupid - choices, and then I was thinking, 'Okay, maybe they do deserve to die.'

For example: they enter the motel's lobby to be greeted by bone-chilling screams emitting from the back room. Mason (Frank Whaley), the motel owner, appears from behind the door, looking like an awkward porn start from the 70's, with his greasy, slick-backed hair, aviator glasses and thick mustache. Mason claims the TV was too loud, but you have to wonder what kind of show features 3 straight minutes of nothing but screaming.

Rather than opting to sleep in the car, David and Amy check-in. It doesn't take them long to discover a small collection of snuff films featuring brutal murders happening in the very room they're in.

But rather than hightailing it out of there immediately, they choose to sit and watch all of the videos, as if one of the movies wasn't confirmation enough, and then proceed to search the room until they find every hidden camera.

From time to time, David and Amy do escape from the room…and yet, every time they do, they eventually return to it. I mean, you could argue that under these extreme circumstance, you wouldn't be left in the most rational state of mind, but c'mon! The moment they're in the room, they're trapped again; wouldn't they be better off just running?

Director Nimrod Antel does a nice job of keeping the action and violence confined to these small spaces (the motel room, the tunnel below the motel, the ceiling ducts, etc) and the film is nicely paced within its own small 80-minutes.

But during that time, it would have been nice to have gotten inside Mason's head to understand why he was the creep that he was, or even explored David and Amy's relationship more, as opposed to reducing 'Vacancy' to another violent, cliché-filled B-movie.

But hey, there's nothing like being chased by masked sociopaths with knives to really bring a bickering couple back together, huh?