Vacancy

Foregoing almost all of the gruesome Saw-esque predilections of the modern horror flick, Vacancy delivers a solid, entertaining, and very old fashioned white-knuckle thrill ride. It’s far more of a suspenseful film than a gratuitous one. It revisits a time when the very possibility of a serial killer lurking outside your door was fodder enough to haunt your dreams. Now, of course, most films barely even tease at the fear of the unknown preyed upon by thrillers like these. They simply open up the door for the killer and proceed to photograph the disembowelment of as many young people as possible.

In this scenario, David and Amy Fox (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale respectively) get sidetracked while looking for a back road and end up in a small deserted town. When their car breaks down (perhaps not by accident?) they hike to the nearest motel. It’s the sort of place that only exists in horror movies – no adjacent buildings, crud covered windows, eerily bright neon signs that seem a little too enthusiastic for you to enter. Even the untouched 70s décor inside feels like something straight out of the Overlook Hotel albeit cheaper and dirtier. It’s one of the delights of this movie that it lets its modern day leads be as naïve as they are. Have they not seen The Shining? It’s almost campy in the way that it tries to pretend that the film itself is taking place in the past (cell phones go out the window very quickly and what’s left is pretty much barbaric hand to hand combat). The need to fight comes after David pops in a VHS tape (again, no DVD?) and discovers that the “honeymoon suite” they’re occupying has been the location of various snuff films. More importantly, in choosing to stay at the motel, he and his wife have just elected themselves to become the stars of a film of their own.

Trapped inside their motel room, the couple must rely on intuition to try and find a way out of their perilous circumstance. The odds are stacked against them, though, since their captors know the lay of the land and they are merely fumbling in the dark toward a car that won’t even start. The movie then launches into an above average series of authentically creepy chase sequences and frightful near misses. There’s actually not all that much blood shed when you think about it, but the sheer terror of it feels far more excruciating than watching beating hearts being removed. There’s a handful of idiotic moments and a maybe questionable conclusion, but compared with most horror movies of the day, this one gets more thrills out of its audience than most. In fact, I’m rarely irked by anything from the horror genre, but this one is so absent of the modern clichés that it truly chills and surprises.

Probably my biggest complaint with the movie is the casting of the banally beautiful Beckinsale and Wilson to play the leads. In a film like The Shining you have strange, compelling personalities like Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall steering the ship, but here you simply have two actors who look as though they’ve just stepped out of a photoshoot for a GAP ad. They severely diminish the low key eeriness of the film and really damage the front end of the movie that attempts to build up relatability with the two characters. They’re marriage is failing and they’ve lost a child, but all of this sounds so contrived coming from these actors. They’ve both done well in superior films from the past, but neither can really give life to the admittedly thin back-story this movie is peddling. Too bad, then, that this back-story comprises a solid 20-30 minutes of the already brief film. It would have desperately improved the movie if more interesting talents that were capable of making such sidebar melodrama fly were at the wheel.

Grade: B