A little over half of the critics who have commented on Nimród Antal’s English-language debut, Vacancy, gave the film a positive review. (cough) I wish I was getting paid what they were under the table (cough) James Berardinelli states that the work is “not predictable” and “[is] more interested in generating dread than offering cheap ‘boo!’ moments.” I have to wonder, did we watch the same film, the one in which I stopped counting the trite “boo moments” after eight (which averages to approximately one every ten minutes) as my wife, a horror watcher by proxy only, called every forthcoming event except one during the feature?
What is more befuddling is how such advocators can applaud a work which mismanages its affairs to such a shameful degree. For example, Antal makes sure to focus upon a car’s license plate so that we can identify it later, something which adds little, very little, to the overall whole, amid introducing a back story and never expounding upon it or given any insight, aside from the monetary gain to be had, in our antagonist’s motives.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that we couldn’t care less about Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson), a perpetually bickering couple who get stranded and have to resort to staying at the Pinewood Motel. As can easily be discerned from the trailer, David stumbles upon a snuff film tape in the room they are staying and so on and so forth. Did I mention Frank Whaley plays Mason, the motel manager, whose VO5 is burning his eyes to such a degree that he is forced to continually remove his glasses and rub his peepers . . . ?
It seems as if Vacancy is another instance of the curse of the directorial horror imports. After the Brothers Pang shook the horror world up with The Eye, America’s green beckoned, resulting in the unwatchable The Messengers. Much the same can be said of Antal who, after his exquisite 2003 feature, Kontroll, flew across the Atlantic to–apparently–have a go at ruining his career.
After a third of the film crawls by at a pace–to quote David–similar to a Zolof and Prozac cocktail, all to no consequential affect, the film gives way to . . . an hour of little consequence. Granted, the filmmaker tries to present a critique of torture porn as he has Amy (ironically) ask, “Why would anyone want to watch this?” as he demystifies the gloss and shine that Eli Roth put on the subgenre but, alas, he attempts to do so without first asking whether there is reason to champion the cause, which leaves me to believe that the only thing to be taken away from Vacancy is that at least one person is still taking Roth seriously. That said, Antal can be praised for attempting to build suspense instead of pouring blood all over the camera, yet at each turn, the rut that is horror cliché counters the director’s every move.
Using a reflective scenario not unlike Lamberto Bava’s Demons, where we watch a theater full of people who are viewing a film in which demons plague a theater full of people before the same fate befalls our reel1 audience (thus the real audience now has something to worry about because the fourth wall has been broken), we sit as two characters realize, via video, that the exact place where they are staying is where people have been murdered. With this in mind, unless Antal is looking forward to pay-per-view in every motel room, his premise seems to be posited for nil.
Moreover, the analogy the director fashions is that being stuck in a sour marriage is equivalent to finding oneself starring in a snuff film as, surprise, the scenario brings the two back together. In a horror film which has the audacity to house the lines “Don’t scream” and “Don’t make a sound” with a straight face, we are further lambasted by a gaggle of consistency oversights, such as the impossibly perfectly laid rug over a trap door someone has just closed behind them, an alternately wet/dry shirt, a chinking of change into an empty hand, a hyperactive television and VCR which automatically play after the electricity comes back on, and police dispatch waiting hours for an officer to report in the wake of sending someone else to investigate.
In short, Nimród Antal’s is an insult to the genre. Fraught with most every cliché in the horror book, thereby eradicating any suspense which might follow, Vacancy is just that, an hour-and-a-half gap waiting for a movie to fill it. Is it not enough that the director has an ax to grind and, paradoxically, instead of ignoring it by way of giving us something better to watch, laces the candy for the knowingly terminal diabetic? Are we not adults here? Please, let me pick my own poison for Christ’s sake. But, then again, there’s blasphemous incorporation of a bird and mirror motif found, where else . . . ?
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
