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DVD Review: VACANCY
By Dave Dreher

Aug 14, 2007, 08:27

A married couple traveling late at night suffers a mechanical breakdown and finds themselves in harms way.

A horror storyline that has been with us since Alfred Hitchcock brought us PSYCHO.  The lonely, remote country motel where evil dwells is a mainstay of the genre and director Nimrod Antal attempts to breath some new life into this tired overdone story line.  And he succeeds to some degree with his new thriller VACANCY.

Relying heavily on mood and atmosphere instead of gore and violence Artel weaves a story that wraps us in pretty quickly by giving us a couple of likeable characters in Luke Wilson and the always lovely Kate Beckinsale who are experiencing some marital problems and we find out pretty early on that they have drifted apart and are finding each others company a bit hard to tolerate. 

The storyline is painfully obvious.  We've got the dude who can't stop and ask directions who manages to get lost while the wife slumbers in a drug induced stupor and awakens to find them way off the beaten path and the car making a "weird noise".  Just up ahead is the often fabled "last stop for 100 miles" motel, gas station.  Our troubled couple stop and find assistance and directions.

All seems well until about a mile or so later down the road the car breaks down for good and our couple are forced to walk back to the creepy oasis they just left.

Basically trapped by their circumstances they check into the deserted motel and then the fun ensues.

Through a series of pretty creepy events our couple figures out that they have checked into their own personal version of MOTEL HELL and the fight for survival is on.

The films takes a brief turn into the "torture porn" arena.  It is brief and thankfully dropped quickly but it's there as Antal uses video tapes of the hotel rooms previous guests to cement our couples possible fates.

I was glad to see that very little time was spent with this idea.  If HOSTEL, HOSTEL Part II and THE DEVILS REJECTS taught us anything it is that horror will find no quicker death than letting "torture porn" become how are genre is defined.

In the end VACANCY ends up being a predictable yet well made thriller that while not bringing anything new to the genre certainly doesn't hurt it any. 

Here's a breakdown of what the DVD holds:


Special Features