The Innkeepers (2011)


The House of the Devil made Ti West one of the best most talked about newcomers when it came to horror directors in the late 2000s.  At the time horror cinema was marred by bad self-referential Scream knockoffs and dreary remakes of Asian horror films and American classics.  Like most things from that decade it was loud and annoying, like having Fred Durst scream in one's ear for 10 years. 

West's approach as much different.  The House of the Devil was a tense buildup to a shock ending, like many older films like The Innocents or The Changeling.  It took place in the 1980s to add a sense of place and time to the throwback style and managed to largely get everything right.  Happily he did not feel he had to go down the same road for his next original film, The Innkeepers.  Although technically he followed up The House of the Devil with Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, a sequel to Eli Roth's hit debut, he disowned that film due to it being taken away by the producers.  Good thing, since The Innkeepers, though nowhere near as effective or as good, is definitely The House of the Devil's spiritual successor. 

Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are the last two remaining employees of the Yankee Pedlar Inn.  The old hotel is about to close, its owner off enjoying Barbados, and Luke and Claire are left to deal with a mother (Alison Bartlett) and her son (Jake Ryan) who are staying at the hotel due to a fight she had with her husband.  Another guest, former actress turned psychic Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), also checks in.  Claire, a fan of Rease-Jones's work, is quite disappointed when she gets the brush-off .

While ticking off their last days Luke and Claire are also doing a little ghost hunting, looking into a legend about the inn that a woman named Madeline O'Malley who supposedly hung herself in her room when her lover failed to show.  As strange events begin to happen Leanne begins to grow concerned about Claire.  The arrival of a strange man demanding to stay in one of the abandoned rooms seems to stir things up even more.  

The problem with The Innkeepers is though it keeps some of the same structure of The House of the Devil there isn't as much of a connection with the characters.  Luke isn't too likeable, while Claire is quite annoying.  Sometimes their interactions are quite normal, while other times it seems like West was too interesting in making Claire awkward and quirky.  Since the connection really isn't there, by the time the supernatural stuff starts happening there's no real tension or investment in either of them.  The biggest disappointment in that is the ending, otherwise, is pretty much worth the wait. 

Ti West himself started going in a different direction after this as well, with The Sacrament being a pseudo-documentary of a Jim Jones-like cult, and then contributing to a number of anthologies and television shows prior to recently making a comeback of sorts with X and Pearl.  Famously, though, he often has a problem with executing his ideas, as great as his movies often look and as interesting as the concepts are.  That is all too evident with The Innkeepers.

The Innkeepers (2011)
Time: 101 minutes
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis
Director: Ti West

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's worst
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman's basement, and most of the props w
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in childbirth, was born
Read more