film | Motel icks

Just about every other coming attraction you see these days seems to be heralding the arrival of another sequel or remake, and maybe it's a further testament to the lack of fresh ideas floating around Hollywood that, even on the rare occasion a film's not blatantly based on a prior work, it usually still feels like you've seen it 11 times before. For example, take VACANCY, an "original" screenplay written by Mark L. Smith that essentially amounts to a greatest-hits compilation of scenes and concepts from sundry better thrillers. In other words, a bickering married couple (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) have nowhere to go but the ooky motel a couple miles down the winding country backroad on which their car died, and what ensues is an overtly familiar mish-mash of Psycho, Breakdown, Duel, 8mm, Joy Ride, Identity, The Hitcher, and U-Turn, and I'm sure there's more, but those are the only titles that came to mind in the 96 seconds it took me to write this sentence.

Actually, the early passages of Vacancy are staged with enough verve and juicy conviction that their redundant uselessness is, at first, quite easy to disregard. The performances by Wilson and Beckinsale emit a chokehold intensity, and director Nimród Antal reinvigorates wheezy horror clichés — the deceptively helpful auto mechanic (Ethan Embry), the off-puttingly kooky desk clerk (Frank Whaley), the apallingly seedy room décor — with visceral pizzazz. As our stranded heroes' anxious unease begins to bleed into reasonable terror, Vacancy offers a gripping — if not notably novel — what's-going-to-happen-next scenario. Unfortunately, what happens next is a big reveal — Wilson and Beckinsale have walked into a grotesque trap set by a snuff-filmmaking crew — that turns the remainder of the film into silly cat-and-mouse stuff, wherein the mice suffer from delayed-reaction syndrome, and the cats come across as too bumbling and disorganized to have successfully carried out this nasty business, as a wall of videotapes suggests, countless times before. Initially, you might appreciate Vacancy for how it manages to effectively unnerve without resorting to the gristle and ick of its shocker contemporaries (Hostel, the Saw series), but you'll eventually realize that it's lacking both blood spatter and brain matter. C