I Wish There Wasn't Any Vacancy

Today, I’m serving up my opinion on the movie, Vacancy.

((SPOILER ALERT))

This weekend, I was channel surfing through my PPV movies and came across the movie, Vacancy starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale. Now I’m a horror movie junkie so I decided to stop and take a look. I read the synopsis, and it sounded mildly interesting so I selected the “Buy Now” button and popped a bag of popcorn for myself. What really drew me to this movie was the fact that it sounded like an urban legend I had heard before.

Anyway, I’m sitting in front of my T.V as the movie starts and the beginning is really slow. It took them almost half an hour to get to the motel where the rest of the movie takes place. Then when they finally got to the motel, they walk into the front office and they hear screaming in the room behind the counter but THEY DON’T LEAVE. That would be my cue to turn around and leave but no, Luke Wilson’s character continues to ring the bell like an idiot. Then I realize that this is going to be one of those movies where the characters run around like idiots and make foolish mistakes. Unfortunately, I’ve already paid for the movie and am now stuck watching this terrible movie. Mind you, I’m only 45 minutes into the movie.

Finally, they get to their motel room and it is less then desirable. It’s so seedy, you wonder why the owner isn’t growing crops in it. (I know, bad analogy but I was feeling kind of punny :P) So they walk into their room and someone keeps banging on the door. They don’t realize that there are no cars in the parking lot and all the keys were behind the owner in the front room so who could be in the room? Anyway, as I’m screaming at my TV, telling them to leave the hotel, the smartest line I heard in the entire movie was spoken by Kate Beckinsale’s character. She says, “Why don’t we just leave and go sleep in the car?” As I breathe a sigh of relief, Luke Wilson’s character shoots down her idea and says, “How about we watch some T.V?”

This is when the movie is supposed to get scary because Luke puts in a VHS tape in the machine and the first thing you see is two men in a room beating up a single man and then they proceed to lynch him. You’d think that would rattle Luke but he just makes a comment along the lines of “They could have at least given us some porn.” He then proceeds to put more tapes in until finally he realizes that the room in the tape is the room that they are in. Again, THEY STILL DON’T LEAVE! They stand around like idiots and look around the room, waiting for the killers to get them. Then the lights begin to flicker on and off and on and off and you catch a quick glimpse of a man in the bathroom!

This is when the movie gets generic and crappy. First of all, they finally decide to leave the room but they see the killers approaching them so they decide to hide behind a decorative that has HOLES in it. Moving on, there’s a lot of running in random directions, at one point they crawl through a tunnel, they meet a trucker that is in cahoots with the owner of the motel. They call the police, the police and the police die. Luke Wilson gets stabbed and Kate Beckinsale must save the day. She drives into the two killers, killing them both and is caught by the owner who tries to strangle her and videotape at the same time because he likes to watch people die which is the basis of the movie (obviously). Kate gets to kick the owner in his sensitive place and then shoots him three times. She goes back to look at Luke, turns out he’s still alive and they live happily ever after.

Basically, this movie was mediocre at best; you knew what was going to happen before it happened. It’s perfectly fine to watch if you’re bored but you should never be that bored. So don’t watch, don’t rent and defintely don’t bother.

That’s your food for thought so be sure to come back for seconds

P.S My blogs don’t have specific days that they will be released so just stay tuned for later instalments for now.