¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #13

UPGRADE

(March 2018)

“I would like to introduce you to my present and the rest of the world’s future.

“I call it ‘Stem.’”

It’s been just over 15 years (Seriously?! 15?!) since Leigh Whannell burst onto the horror scene alongside James Wan with Saw.

And while Wan has gone on to direct titles outside the horror genre like Furious 7 and Aquaman (both of which crossed the $ 1 billion(!) threshold at the box office), Whannell has largely stayed within its confines, also helping birth the Insidious franchise with long-time collaborator Wan.

He then tried out the director’s chair on Insidious: Chapter 3.

Thankfully, he seems to have enjoyed that experience, enough that he’s given us his sophomore feature, Upgrade.*

“I am Stem. The system operating your body for you.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Set in the near-future, where technology has become even more all-encompassing than it already is today, Grey Trace (an excellent Logan Marshall-Green) suddenly finds himself a quadriplegic after a vicious attack.

Bitter and despondent, he’s given a chance to walk again by wealthy tech mogul Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson, who was in Amazon’s recent TV adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock).

But what could have been a second chance at a normal life becomes a bloody vengeance spree with the help of Grey’s new best friend, Stem.

“You now have full control again, Grey.”

Upgrade’s trailer suggests a balls to the wall sci-fi actioner, and the film proves to be that, an occasionally wild and exhilarating ride as Whannell executes some visual acrobatics to convey to the audience Grey’s tech-enhanced mobility. (It should be noted that Upgrade went home with the Midnighters Audience Award from the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival.)

But the film is also spiced up with some gory kills and a potent streak of techno horror, as we get exposed to the fears and anxieties of how technology can impact on our humanity, on both individual and societal levels.

And that streak is wide and prevalent enough to land Upgrade onto this year’s ¡Qué horror! Candidates list.

“I’m sorry. We can’t let them win.”

* He’s also signed on to write and direct a new iteration of The Invisible Man, as well as tackle a remake of Escape from New York (for which he’s writing the script with the possibility of directing also open).

Parting Shot 1:

Reviews for Saw (and Saw IV) can be found here (and here); Insidious made the Candidates list in the ¡Qué horror! 2011 rundown.

More Logan Marshall-Green can be found in ¡Qué horror! 2011 Candidate Devil and ¡Qué horror! 2016 title The Invitation.

Parting Shot 2:
Get Out's very own Georgina, Betty Gabriel, appears here as Detective Cortez.
She's also currently starring in Season 2 of the brilliant, sci fi-tinged espionage show, Counterpart.

(Upgrade OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

FUNNY GAMES U.S.
(Review)

"I've been accused of 'raping' the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely—all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What's different about my films is this: I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence."
-- Michael Haneke

Well, consider me frakked.

In Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot English-language remake of his 1997 Funny Games, George and Ann Farber (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts) are a couple of rich, white folk vacationing at their lakeside home for a couple of weeks. They’ve brought their son, Georgie (Devon Gearhart), and their dog, Lucky.
Naturally, in a film like this, when there’s a dog named “Lucky,” you can bet your bottom dollar that the mutt will be anything but.
You see, a pair of insanely courteous young lunatics (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) clad in immaculate white, are about to make a house call, all set to torture, not just the unlucky family, but the film’s audience as well.

With the cold, clinical precision that is his cinematic stock-in-trade, Haneke basically hijacks his audience and unleashes a confrontational and provocative indictment of what passes off as “entertainment” in today’s culture.
Funny Games U.S. (and its original Austrian progenitor) challenges its audience: so you like movies where people get tortured and terrorized? Well, see if you enjoy this.
With its largely static camerawork, its lack of a traditional musical score, and painfully frank performances, Funny Games U.S. presents the horrible scenario in a seemingly very real manner, while simultaneously tearing down the fourth wall on a number of occasions, reminding us that, A) this is a fiction, and B) we, the audience, are complicit in what we are witnessing.
Because this is, after all, unfolding for our entertainment.
Given that this is a decidedly non-Hollywood approach to the idea, and given that this is clearly Heneke’s agenda, it becomes obvious that Funny Games U.S. isn’t meant to be “entertainment.”
From all of what I’ve said above, it’s plainly evident that Funny Games U.S. is meant to be “art.”
And that’s I believe the sticking point of this entire quandary.

Let me use Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible as an example.
Irreversible is the sort of grueling cinematic experience that I really wouldn’t want to repeat. Viewing it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
But I do appreciate what Noe seems to be saying in it, the manner in which the narrative unfolds (begin at the end of the story in a very chaotic, nauseating manner, and work our way towards the beginning, with the camerawork gradually becoming calm and steady), part and parcel of his message.
Clearly, Irreversible is not entertainment. But I do believe that it is art.
So what’s to stop someone who makes a film that’s non-stop degradation and torture without any apparent message from claiming that there is, after all, a message (those who don’t “get it” merely ill-equipped to understand), and that his film is “art”?
And aren’t the lines that separate art and entertainment ultimately subjective?
Let’s face it: I may think Irreversible is art, but someone else will probably denounce it as filth and look at me like some sort of unhinged deviant for even considering Irreversible as a piece of art.
By the same token, I’m sure there are films out there others consider “art” that I, personally, just don’t get. (Apparently, I too, can be ill-equipped.)
Then there are those films that are ostensibly entertainment, and yet manage to say something substantial and potent about the human condition, that manage to bridge the gap and present some sort of hybrid.
Are they entertainment? Art? Or both?

Now, any Iguana regulars reading this will know that horror with significant subtext is pretty much my speed. As such, Haneke’s preaching to the choir here. (See, Herr Haneke, “No” really does mean “No.”)
But the reality is, I also happen to love films like the first Saw and Eli Roth’s Hostel films (particularly the second), because in them, I feel there is subtext, there are messages amidst the gore and the grue.
Now, whether or not Haneke will agree with me, I’ll never know. And for that matter, where is Haneke’s line, his personal demarcation between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” violence?
Shouldn’t all violence be unacceptable? But in a frank discussion of violence (the kind art can engage in), isn’t the depiction of it a necessity?
And with any depiction of violence, don’t we return to the question of acceptability? How much can we show so as to make our point?
So many questions…

In asking what Herr Haneke’s personal demarcation is though, I believe I’m missing the real point, which is, What is my personal demarcation? Where do I draw the line?
And where do you?

Parting shot: Reviews of Saw and Hostel II can be found in the Archive.

Parting shot 2: Incidentally, both Haneke and Noe were included by avclub.com in a list of 17 “Notorious Living, Working Cinematic Provocateurs,” which uses Haneke’s New York Times quote in its title.
Others on the list include Park Chan-Wook, Takashi Miike, Oliver Stone, Lars von Trier, and Michael Moore.

(Funny Games U.S. OS [design by Crew Creative Advertising] and UK quad courtesy of impawards.com; Funny Games DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Funny Games U.S. images courtesy of ign.com.)

CATACOMBS
(Review)

My profuse apologies to the late producer Gregg Hoffman, to whose memory this film is dedicated.

200 years ago Paris ran out of room to bury its dead.
By royal decree the remains of 7 million bodies were relocated to an abandoned limestone mine beneath the city.
Today, the most romantic city in the world sits just one hundred feet above…
… the largest mass grave in history.
The empire of the dead.

This is the woefully dire pronouncement at the head of the film, that quickly follows an eyebrow-raising “Inspired by True Events” claim (I get very dubious when a horror movie tacks that onto itself these days, but that’s a whole other story), as if these little bits weren’t actually mentioned in characters’ dialogue later on in Catacombs.
Very briefly, Catacombs follows young and nervous and rather imaginative Victoria (Shannyn Sossamon), who travels to Paris on the behest of her sister Carolyn (Alecia Moore, better known to the free world as Pink), and is swept away from a rave being held in the titular Parisian catacombs, into a not-so-frightening ordeal of the masked psycho stalker variety.

Now, please pardon the very Neanderthal piggy comment, but I’ve always thought Shannyn Sossamon was hot.
The thing is, the only film I’ve seen her in that I’ve actually enjoyed was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, while most of her other film work aren’t the sort of movies I go out of my way to watch. I did see The Sin Eater, but that was lamentably lame, and I saw bits of A Knight’s Tale on cable, but that didn’t look so great either.
So I was hoping I could add Catacombs to that list of one, but alas, I shall have to wait and hope the One Missed Call remake is the contender I’ve been waiting for.

One of the problems Catacombs has (and it has quite a number) is that the initial set-up and the eventual predicament Victoria finds herself in is played out in a rather daft manner, so much so that the climactic turn the plot takes is something that I was convinced was going on the entire time.
The apparent threat and suspense never really sets in as concrete reality, largely since Victoria never quite comes across as an actual person. There’s no identification here at all. She’s saddled with a nervous, introverted personality (with the prescribed medication to match)—her “issues,” as sister Carolyn so compassionately puts it—without any back story at all to explain why this is the case. She’s just a Nervous (and rather annoying) Nelly.
There’s only one moment in the entire film—sadly enough, when Victoria actually commits a ruthless and selfish act—that Sossamon comes across as a real person, capable of the most cruel action in the interests of self-preservation.
Every other instance is her being ragged on by Carolyn and Carolyn’s friends, or shrieking her fool head off as she’s stalked by the goat head-masked psycho.

But the fact of the matter is, the exact sequence of events that bring her to the catacombs and the terrible poopy mess she steps in, is so boneheaded, one can’t help but discover a complete lack of sympathy for the character and the predicament she finds herself in.
When she goes off to wander the labyrinth on her own, to the shouted warning from Carolyn of, “Don’t be a retard,” one can’t help but get all MST3K on Catacombs and go, “Everyone in this damned movie is a retard.”
And the whole “One must surround himself with reminders of death to fully appreciate life” jazz comes off as juvenile bubble gum pop psychology, when presented to us by Carolyn and the intellectual giant, Jean Michele (Mihai Stanescu), who also regales us with the ludicrous tale of the Cult of the Black Virgin and the goat head-masked psycho (apparently a low rent attempt to breed the AntiChrist), an account which comes complete with bizarre stutter-strobe images, presumably courtesy of Victoria’s overactive imagination.
At least, it sounded ludicrous when told to us like this.

I mean, with all that talk of “Oh, oui, people wind up missing all the time down here,” then the pervasive question of “Why the hell are we raving our heads off down here again?” glares in our faces like an irritating strobe light, a rudely inescapable reality.
It’s the 21st century “Inspired by True Events” horror movie equivalent of building a house on ancient Indian burial ground: this is simply a place you shouldn’t be in at all. Period.
If you insist on staying past the first lame “Boo,” then you deserve everything that’s coming to you. (And in Catacombs’ case, that’s certainly true of Carolyn.)

There is nothing here at all that I can commend, and even certain editing choices come off as bargain basement attempts to emulate Kevin Greutert‘s excellent work on Saw.
There’s even the climactic montage of Significant Moments and Telling Lines that, here in Catacombs, feels hideously unnecessary, as if it was there in the vain hope that it would elicit a “Well, don’t I feel like a dunce, I didn’t see that one coming at all” reaction from the less-attentive members of the audience.
In fact, a lot of Catacombs feels like underlining and overemphasis, leaving you with the urge to shout, rather irrationally, at the screen, “Yes, I got it!”
But, like some communicable disease, or an invite to a party that turns out to be a horrid stinker, or a postcard asking you to come to bloody Paris, you’ll only wish you hadn’t.

Parting shot: I don’t relish writing bad reviews. I know any movie, no matter how bad, had hundreds of people who worked on it, and many of them would probably have nothing at all to do with the flaws of the movie in the first place.
So, not only did I feel bad because Gregg Hoffman gave the horror world Saw, and he’s credited as one of the producers on Catacombs, but also because the film was co-written and co-directed by Tomm Coker, whose early comic book art I rather enjoyed.
And what’s worse, being co-writer and -director would mean he had at least half to do with why Catacombs was as awful as it was.
Apologies to you too, Tomm. I really do like your art, but Catacombs was terrible.

(Catacombs DVD cover art courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

ON THE LOT
Episode 14
America’s Choice

Wow. Second nasty On The Lot surprise in as many weeks.
Zach. That is such a bummer. The guy I thought was a shoo-in for Final Three. Zach was like the Hiro of On The Lot, you know? The one who seemed the most enthusiastic and excited about the whole prospect of working with Spielberg at Dreamworks.
In retrospect, I think Zach just sort of stumbled badly with that one-two “Bonus Feature” fiasco. I’m almost sorry I pointed out the whole sequel/pirates thing last week.
Crap. Well, Spielberg better be watching his own show, and can spot the creativity in Mr. Lipovsky, or some other movie mogul is gonna swoop in and take him under their wing.
Zach, I’ll be watching for you, dude.

So tonight’s shorts all took off from the logline, a man wakes up in a dress, and can’t remember the night before.

MY FAVORITE: Adam Stein’s “Army Guy”
Sgt. Joe wakes up in a dress, and is constantly accosted by Candy, who wants to marry him, but Joe’s too busy tracking down the Russian scoundrel Dmitri, who also apparently has a thing for girly clothes…
Hands down the most ambitious short tonight, and the clear winner (all three judges thought so too). Though the reveal wasn’t really a surprise, and the film does owe a lot to Joe Dante (recalling Small Soldiers and Dante’s “It’s a Good Life“ segment from Twilight Zone: The Movie), Adam still delivers a good, solid, and fun piece.

Will Bigham’s “The Yes Men”
The big boss wakes up in his office in a dress, and all the lackies and the sycophants take note.
A great, absurd look at the working environment and just how far people are willing to go to get ahead, Will’s entry is the only short to pretty much sidestep the “why” of the dress and focus on the effects of it on the characters around it (as opposed to the character in it).

Sam Friedlander’s “Dress For Success”
A lecherous, chauvinist boss is taught a lesson by three female employees.
The short starts out good, with some Saw overtones, but stumbles into 9 to 5 territory, diluting the entire affair. (Guest judge F. Gary Gray rightly points out that the two tones don’t quite mesh.)
The punchline was okay though, and was quite possibly the reason why it played better for me than Jason’s short…

MY LEAST FAVORITE: Jason Epperson’s “Oh, Boy.”
A man wakes up in a dress on a suburban lawn, with explosives strapped to his waist. He’s then ordered to do ridiculous things, or else, boom.
Again, Jason doesn’t do it for me, and the ending he delivers (the best of a dozen, or so he claims) just plays like one of those hokey Hollywood, Hey, look! No one got hurt and no one died in this movie (even if, by all rights, they should have) endings.

So these are the shorts that are gonna determine who the Final Three are, and if past experience has taught me anything (just look at last week’s results), Jason will slide into Final Three like a greased pig.
So… I don’t really want to think about who’s going home next. Let’s just all be surprised next week.

As I mentioned above, tonight’s guest judge was F. Gary Gray, who brought us Friday, The Italian Job, and The Negotiator. Of that sampling of Gray’s work, I’ve only seen The Italian Job, which was one of those okay Hollywood heist films. You know, popcorn entertainment. But hey, at least Gray comes across a lot better than Michael Bay does.

Next week: Final Three.

(Contestant image courtesy of thelot.com; F. Gary Gray image courtesy of dga.org.)

reVIEW (11) 
SAW

With Saw IV set to open this Halloween, I thought it a good idea to resurrect this review, which was previously published in 2004 under the title, “The Big Blood-Drenched Picture.”

jigsaw n : a machine saw with a narrow vertically reciprocating blade for cutting curved and irregular lines or ornamental patterns in openwork
vt : to arrange or place in an intricate or interlocking way in the manner of the parts of a jigsaw puzzle
adj : suggesting a jigsaw puzzle or its separate pieces

James Wan’s Saw is the cinematic equivalent of a bear trap (to borrow an analogy from the film); once it begins, those rusty, razor-toothed jaws snap shut, and there’s little else you can do but sit riveted to your seat till the bitter, bloody end.
What if you woke up to find yourself chained to a pipe in a decrepit bathroom, without knowing who put you there, or why?
From this seed, the twisted and gnarled script of Saw—written by Leigh Whannell, who plays Adam in the film—grows.
And it turns out to be one of the best, most intense, and most involving English-language horror films made in quite a while.

An excellent marriage of content and technique, Wan’s directing style, modern and yet not too MTV for its own good, complements the non-linear script written by Whannell to a tight tee. In much the same way that the David Goyer-written script for Alex Proyas’ Dark City emulated the structure of a spiral (a central image of the film), Whannell’s script is a jigsaw puzzle, referring to a central story element of Saw. The plot is structured in such a way that events and revelations are parceled out to us like puzzle pieces, for us to feverishly plant in place, as we attempt to make out the big picture. And, deviously, Whannell and Wan give us pieces that can fit into their slot in more than one way, so our perception of the big picture can change in an instant.

Now, a short lesson: the difference between a plot twist, and a plot flip.
A plot twist is a sudden curveball in the story that you don’t see coming: the apparent good guy who turns out to be a baddie; the seemingly innocuous neighbor who turns out to be a government agent. Plot twists in recent films are (spoilers!!!): exactly who the sacrifice is in Darkness, bringing to light just how wise the titular evil really is, or the fact that there is no Totenkopf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, merely the video ghost of Sir Lawrence Olivier playing God-in-absentia, as his clockwork creation continues to run through its programmed agenda. There is also the last-second revelation that Beatrix’s child is still alive, at the end of Kill Bill Volume One.
A plot flip is a single event or revelation in the story which results in a total re-evaluation of everything that came before it, a pivot point in the story which requires you to see the whole tale from a different perspective. A very popular plot flip is the ending of The Sixth Sense, which forces you to see the whole film in an entirely different light. There is also Neo’s awakening from The Matrix into the real world (though this occurs early on in the film’s running time), or the pair of flips in Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters).

The wonderful thing about Saw is that it has twists and it has flips. Usually, a film will either have a bunch of twists, or one flip; it’s rare that a film will contain both. (The Village is another recent film that displays its fair share of flips and twists.)
In Saw, the twists and flips are sudden and savage, malevolent Jack in the Boxes that spring out with a demonic howl, leaving in their wake a stunned sense of revelation, as we stand in ever-widening pools of blood, for a few precious moments too shocked to move, lest another come leaping out of the darkness (which it sometimes does).

Now, two films Saw has been compared to since its release are The Blair Witch Project and Se7en, Project merely because of Saw’s low production cost (reportedly less than $10 million), Se7en because of its mood and content.
Se7en seems the more valid of the two comparisons, though I will say this: Saw displays genuine malignancy and unease, as opposed to the faux dress-me-up-in-moody-dimly-lit sequences of MTV malevolence that characterizes Se7en.*
While The Blair Witch Project is the resounding triumph of marketing over content, Se7en is the victory of style over substance.
Saw, for better or worse, is the real thing; it’s the Se7en I wish Se7en had been.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival last January to sold-out screenings, Saw is currently enjoying box-office success in the US. Clearly, Saw has hit a nerve, and audiences are twitching and screaming and grimacing, fingers slipping on blood-drenched pieces, as they try desperately to put the puzzle together before the clock runs out.

* Just to be clear: I'm not saying Se7en is a bad film. Not at all.
But I strongly feel that whatever's good about it, is all thanks to David Fincher. What I'm saying is, remove Fincher's style from the equation, and there doesn't seem to be too much in Andrew Kevin Walker's script to differentiate it significantly from any other random religion-obsessed serial killer thriller.
Meanwhile, I feel that there's enough in Whannell's script that, even if it had been helmed by a director less inventive than Wan, that the resultant film would have still been an effective one. 

Parting shot: Saw is intense horror, and quite possibly not to everyone’s tastes. A good barometer would be Se7en: if you found that agreeable to your cinematic palette, chances are, you’ll appreciate Saw.

(Saw OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)

CAPTIVITY
(Review)

There are some movies that just don’t live up to the hype. Roland Joffe’s Captivity is one of them.
Even as gorno became the horror genre’s whipping boy, billboard ads for Captivity (which tells the story of the abduction and torture of fashion model du jour Jennifer Tree, played by 24’s Elisha Cuthbert), apparently unapproved by the MPAA, went up in New York and Los Angeles this past March. The billboards—which featured four panels depicting Cuthbert in the stages, Seduction, Confinement, Torture, and Termination—attracted a firestorm of controversy, and were subsequently pulled down.
Thus did Captivity become “the movie they didn’t want you to see!” (Or so the trailer put it following the billboard incident.)
As it is, there’s probably more excitement in the hullabaloo of that run-in with the MPAA than can be found in the film itself.

This is a limp and tepid exercise in thrills, and the twice-Oscar-nominated Joffe (for directing The Killing Fields and The Mission) never manages to raise the tension level above the slow simmering that runs through the film’s entire course. There is one brief moment, about an hour into the film, when something happens that could make you wonder, “Okay. So where are you taking this?”
Past that point though, the film settles back into its slothful zombie shuffle and sort of just shambles off towards its uninteresting climax.

Nothing really quite works in Captivity.
Once you get past the initial sense of discomfort and unease at the idea of abduction, things settle into a sense of humdrum tedium that never fully leaves the premises, like an unwanted, overstaying guest.
And while Jennifer is tortured (largely a psychological ordeal; despite appearances, this film is hardly gorno), the bits of police procedural interspersed throughout the proceedings seem lackadaisical, as if Joffe were begrudgingly giving us these scenes because that was expected of him. It doesn’t help that Michael Harney and Laz Alonso, who play the detectives, aren’t exactly the Oscar types either.

Additionally, the identity of the mystery abductor is immediately obvious to any film geek. (And if you don’t instantly identify the abductor when you get to see the eyes, pay attention to the abductor’s actions.)
Thus, not only is there no tension, there is no real mystery either.
So that’s bad enough. But the film also chooses to leave the abductor’s psychology a complete blank to the audience. By movie’s end, we have no frakking idea why all this happened. We get no sense of the abductor’s past, of the presumed trauma that caused this much psychological damage.

And ultimately, Captivity is also the kind of movie that doesn’t seem to have a point at all.
Certainly, this is not entertainment.
A: I would not call a bad movie “entertainment.”*
And more importantly, B: The reality of abduction and torture and murder is hardly “entertainment.”
Even with films as dark as the first Saw and Hostel, there were points to be made, and skill and savvy used to tell the tale. Captivity seems to have none of these.
There is a brief brush against the class divide, as Jennifer is made out to be a rich b!tch who has no real idea of how the other half lives, as well as some babble about the only real things being what you can touch, but these ideas don’t really go anywhere, trapped in the dreary hollow of this film the way Jennifer is in her cell.
And though it was apparently Joffe’s intent that Captivity be about “female empowerment” (the common PR spin for horror movies that have women running about and screaming and being stalked by unsavoury, would-be killers), I really don’t see that.
And even if the whole female empowerment aspect managed to escape me somehow, even if it’s actually there, hiding under the bed or in the crawlspace, it still wouldn’t change the fact that it’s contained in a drab and uninvolving film.

At the end of it all, Captivity just doesn’t seem to be worth the time or the effort to actually sit down and watch it.
It’s not exciting, it’s not thrilling, and it doesn’t have anything important to say. (Yes, I am aware that these things happen. All I have to do to know that is watch the news. I don’t need an uninspired horror movie to make me aware that we live in very troubled times.)
It doesn’t even have the gore.
All it really does have is Elisha Cuthbert in peril, and we already saw that on 24 Day 2, and in the House of Wax remake.
And on that note, I’d have to say that watching either is a far better prospect than enduring Captivity. (Yes, even if Paris Hilton is in House of Wax. Not only does House of Wax have an interesting climactic sequence as the eponymous house melts in a raging fire while the principals are still in it, but if you need added incentive, there is the opportunity to cheer madly when Paris gets iced. Come on, admit it. You want to.)

* Unless of course, it falls into the MST3K/so-bad-it’s-good territory, in which case, you can’t beat that kind of entertainment.
Captivity clearly does not have a passport or VISA to enter said territory.

(Captivity OS and billboard ad image courtesy of wilaboutmovies.com)

VACANCY
(Review)

As if to pay homage to the granddaddy of all “loony in a motel” films, Vacancy opens* with what can be viewed as the 21st-century descendant of the Saul Bass-designed title sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho, a sequence which coolly segues into the license plate of the car of Amy (Kate Beckinsale) and David Fox (Luke Wilson), a couple under the strain of an impending divorce.
It’s late, they’re lost, and the car’s beginning to look like it could be trouble. After apparently getting some help from a mechanic (Ethan Embry, goofy stoner Mark from Empire Records and the Jennifer Love Hewitt-yearning Preston from Can’t Hardly Wait), the Foxes eventually end up at the Pinewood Motel, overseen by its weirdo manager, Mason (Frank Whaley, fantastic in Keith Gordon’s A Midnight Clear and Thomas Carter’s Swing Kids).
They’re forced to spend the night at the ratty Honeymoon Suite, and when David can’t find anything on TV, he sticks in a VHS tape.
That’s when the fun starts.

Much as Eli Roth’s Hostel did, Vacancy uses the idea of torture and violence as a commercial venture as the springboard for its plot, and succeeds in giving its audience a tense and engaging thriller.
This is doubly interesting to me, as the film’s central idea is also a reflection on the fact that this kind of horror film (alternately called “torture porn”—from a phrase coined by New York Magazine’s David Edelstein—or my personal preference, “gorno”) is proving very profitable for Hollywood.
If the baddies of Hostel and Vacancy can make a quick buck off the misery and torture of hapless innocents, than why can’t Hollywood rip off audiences the world over with shrill screams and fake blood?
For any of you out there though who may take offense at anything called “torture porn,” let me assure you, Vacancy’s on-screen gore quotient is minimal in the extreme. There is violence of course, but not the sort of splatter movie violence where we see dismemberment and eye gouging and disemboweling. Vacancy is more thriller than gorno, and it’s a taut little bugger too.

What makes Vacancy even more effective is the fact that you become embroiled in this sullen, largely toxic relationship between husband and wife, played effectively by Beckinsale and Wilson. You feel the tension and the regret that this couple share, and you sense the spectre of the love that was once there.
You sympathize with them so much, that when the fit hits the shan, it’s actually a relief that they don’t devolve into hysterical recrimination. (After all, isn’t the fact that your lives are in danger far more important than anything else?)
It’s also a relief to see Beckinsale in something other than body-hugging black leather making out with Ben from Felicity, so if just for that, Amy Fox is a singular triumph.

If Vacancy has a weakness though, it can arguably be found in an ending that both soft pedals what came just before it, and perhaps in striving for realism (no protracted “psycho gets up after being stabbed/shot/mortally wounded to relentlessly stalk his victim” sequence here), director Nimrod Antal (Kontroll) and writer Mark L. Smith wind up crafting a climax that feels somewhat truncated.
That last shot had a feeling of: What?! That’s it?
Still, all in all, the ride getting to that final shot is worth it.
And if you’re not gonna give me much more than a good story about people in extreme, life-threatening situations (ie. no social or political commentary amidst the grue), then I’d much rather see an effective, if somewhat flawed, thriller than scene after scene of pointless blood and gore.

* It’s a savvy title sequence that’s one of the most interesting I’ve seen this year. (And that one sheet just slays, too.)

Parting shot: I love the conflation “gorno” (gore + porno), as it has that sleazy vibe to it, and a majority of the sub-genre’s titles strike me as violence for violence’s sake.
Don’t get me wrong, I love me a good horror film. Always have, always will.
But once you’ve seen Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, seeing other films of extreme violence (or, Heaven help me, seeing remakes of these classic films of extreme violence) just seems rather pointless, if they have nothing much more in their celluloid beyond the gore and grue.
Unless the point is to make a ton of money on a relatively low budget, which seems to be the case a lot of the time.
Now, when the film is a Hostel or a Saw, then I get it, and these are two of the films that give gorno its good name.
But when it’s a Turistas, or a Saw sequel, or a Texas Chainsaw remake (or prequel), or a Hills Have Eyes remake (or sequel remake), then these are the sort of films that give gorno its bad name.
And as you can see from the above sampling, they outnumber the goodies, believe me.

(Vacancy OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)