Vacancy starring Kate Beckinsale,
Luke Wilson, Frank Whaley, Ethan
Embry, Scott G. Anderson
Terrific Terror!
A confined setting is a useful tool for thriller-makers,
and Vacancy is definitely boxed in: a rundown motel way, way off the
Interstate, the kind of place where unsuspecting movie characters go to
get stabbed to death in the shower. If Vacancy doesnt quite live up to its
Hitchcockian forbears, at least it provides 80 minutes of well-designed
mayhem. You know somebodys paying attention just from the opening
credits, a clever vortex with pounding music by Paul Haslinger. Then we
meet unhappy couple Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, driving along in
the dark and forced to stay at the Pinewood Motel after a car breakdown.
Theres a night man (Frank Whaley, decadent) in the tradition of Dennis
Weavers Touch of Evil gargoyle, but the real mess of trouble is waiting in
room number 4. Director Nimrod Antal, who scored a stylish international
hit with the Hungarian thriller Kontroll, squeezes maximum juice out of the
Route 66 atmosphere of the motel, although the movie doesnt get under
your skin the way Kontroll did. Wilson and Beckinsale are a little too
marquee-namish for this kind of heavy-breathing work, and the script
doesnt give them much to play with. But hey, its not that kind of movie.
Where it really belongs is on the top half of a drive-in double bill, or maybe
as a nightmare-scenario TV movie from the Seventies. Either way, it
works. --Robert Horton
Stills from Vacancy (click for larger image)
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By the Director
This is one of the better thriller/horror films that came out around this time.
So many of the other scary films that came out were either about chopping
up and guts for the sake of entertainment, or following some boring
formula. This ones thrives on its leading characters, ordinary people, just
like everyone else who moment by moment begin to realize theyre in
trouble. And their lies the terror. We know these people have seen a
horror film and act just like any of us would act had wed been stuck in their
situation. There is a Hitchcock feel with the building of the characters first
before the horror.
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