Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson star as a bickering couple named Amy and David Fox who are out on the road at night. Thanks to traffic on the Interstate, David tries to take a shortcut on a desolate rural road--but he winds up getting lost, even though he won’t admit it to Amy. After narrowly running over a raccoon--and nearly killing himself and Amy in the process--David winds up damaging a fan blade inside the car’s engine, which makes a scary rattling sound. Stopping off at a gas station, they manage to catch the attendant just before he’s about to go home. He fixes the car for them--or so they think, because it soon breaks down about a mile away from the gas station.
Walking back, David and Amy take a room at the run-down motel next door, which
is run by Frank Whaley in full, twitchy psycho mode. Rule number one: if you
step into a creepy looking motel, and the clerk is listening to the sounds of a
woman screaming her head off, you might want to move on. But David and Amy are
just too tired to even bother, so they shack up in one of the rooms--which is so
filthy that even Norman Bates would be put off. Which brings me to rule number
two: if the cockroaches in your motel room are bigger than rats--again, you
might want to move on. It’s only when David finds several videotapes in the room,
which show several different people being murdered in the very same motel room,
that he and Amy finally realize there’s something seriously wrong.
Which brings up another point, why would a bunch of torture porn psychos leave
videotapes of their past kills in the room so it could serve to warn their
future victims? Vacancy is basically Hostel-lite, which is good, because we’re
not treated to extended scenes of people being tortured to death; however, the
film tries hard to be a cat and mouse thriller worthy of Hitchcock, and it keeps
falling flat on its face, thanks to the various and sundry plot holes that are
large enough to run a chainsaw through. It keeps going for the predictable shock moment,
without thinking too hard about having the overall plot make any sense.
I saw this movie because I was a fan of
Kate Beckinsale from her Underworld films, and while she’s still spunky here
without resorting to her kick-butt Selene character, her presence alone wasn’t
enough to save this flick for me. Luke Wilson looks appropriately concerned as David, and Frank Whaley is actually
fun to watch as the anal-retentive leader of the psychos who obsesses constantly
over the little details his job requires him to look after (hey, you think it’s
easy running a flea-bag motel that kills its visitors for snuff films?). What’s
amazing is that the film is barely 90 minutes in length, and yet it still
dragged in places for me. Which goes to show that the only lethal thing you can
die of by staying at this motel is of sheer boredom.
--SF
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