VACANCY

Vacancy is a great thriller/horror which I really enjoyed. The fairly average reviews it got upon release did it a great disservice, as it was a far, far better film than they would have you believe.

The premise is that couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) get lost off the interstate, break down, and have to spend the night in a grotty run down motel in the middle of nowhere. In Hills Have Eyes style, it turns out they are out of cell phone range too. They bed down in their motel room, watching the tv to distract from having to converse with each other, when it suddenly becomes apparent that the horror film they are watching on tv is in actual fact an extremely real snuff movie that has taken place in their very room!

From that point on, the tension rachets up to unbearable levels, providing some genuine scares, with the fear coming from what would ordinarily be the mundane - phone ringing, door knocking, face at the window and so on. Director Nimrod Antal (soon to be directing Rodriguez’s new PREDATORS movie apparently) stated in the dvd extras that he was going for more of a Hitchcockian thriller than a horror movie, and I think he certainly nailed it for the most part. He sets his stall out with an excellent Hitchcock style title sequence with lots of discombobulating text. The story itself, with its creepy motel setting, obviously yanks the old memory chords in favour of PSYCHO.

It works because when the couple are trapped in the room, it is terrifying because of both the ludicrousness of the situation and the fact it remains very believable. It’s not giving too much away to say when they leave the room, and start running around the complex the scares are less effective because it becomes more of a chase / pursuit slasher flick.

My minor quibble is with the snuff films. I think they were a little too disturbing for the tone of the film. They were unpleasant to watch - even on the screen within a screen – and they ended up making the film stray too close to the kind of dreck Eli Roth excretes, and which this movie coasts loftily above. On the other hand they certainly helped invoke the fear of the couple trapped in the room. I just think I could have stood to have seen less of the footage. The wisdom of including them as dvd extras is most definitely lost on me though!

The other thing that sort of amused me was that one of the villans masks made him look like a grey William H. Macy!

I suppose, some parts of Vacancy were pretty predictable, but there's nothing wrong with predictability if done well, and this movie is a comfortably better than average horror thriller. It’s a good fun scare that will probably, undeservedly, slip under most peoples radar. Wilson and Beckinsale were both great and I would say this is perfect viewing for upcoming Halloween movie fests!

IMDB: VACANCY