Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 18, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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Vacancy is a movie in which people get away with murder, in more ways than one. Not only have its villains been brutally killing people in secret for some time as the story opens, but the filmmakers telling this tale weave a number of credibility whoppers into the narrative and still manage to maintain a hold on the viewer while delivering the frights. Even as I groaned inwardly at its more implausible details, the film still had me jumping and even vocally responding to the action at times, and that was in a private screening room with about half a dozen other attendees; this movie will probably kill with a Saturday-night theater crowd. For all its dramatic hiccups, Vacancy delivers more of what you go to a horror movie for than any other genre film so far this year, Grindhouse excepted.
And Mark L. Smith’s screenplay has a surefire thriller premise that updates Psycho for the video age. David and Amy Fox (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) are bickering their way down a lonely nighttime stretch of Southwestern highway when they develop car trouble and pull into a remote gas station. A young mechanic (Ethan Embry) supposedly fixes the vehicle, but it breaks down after a couple of miles, forcing the couple to seek shelter at the lonely motel adjoining the station. The proprietor, Mason (Frank Whaley), seems a little weird, but hey, it’s the only game in town. To their credit, Smith and director Nimrod Antal don’t pretend that the audience won’t know immediately that Mason and the mechanic have less-than-friendly intentions toward the Foxes, and Antal lopes through the setup scenes with a brisk but not rushed pace. Once the couple is ensconced in their dump of a room, there are a couple of nicely played and written scenes establishing the particulars of their relationship.
Then David, looking for some entertainment, checks out one of the videotapes lying on the VCR, and finds what appears to be a low-budget murder movie on it. He looks at another cassette and finds a similar scenario being played out in the same room—and once he watches the third, he and Amy come to the horrified realization that it’s their room in which the assorted helpless victims are being attacked. They discover hidden cameras secreted within the walls and furniture, and realize that they’re intended to be the stars of tonight’s snuff production.
I won’t spoil any details of what comes next (the TV commercials have already seen to that); suffice to say that Antal and Smith manage to move the action in and out of the motel and gas station buildings to give it variety, while keeping the proceedings both pacey and claustrophobic. Like any good scare show, Vacancy keeps the audience in “what would I do?” mode while also engaging sympathy for its frightened protagonists, whose actions aren’t always the right ones but don’t become outrageously foolish. Wilson and Beckinsale have a down-to-Earth chemistry that perfectly suits the material, while Whaley’s off-center delivery (suggesting a demented cousin of William H. Macy) makes Mason engagingly creepy, and believable as a kind of small-time criminal mastermind.
Antal scatters glimpses of the past snuff productions throughout to add extra shivers, and the final-reel action is rousingly staged, though there’s at least one lamentable development toward the very end, along with the suggestion that another was omitted in the final edit. The film in general moves along briskly, and Antal and editor Armen Minasian bring the whole thing in at 85 minutes—no longer than a movie like this should be. Other notable craft contributions are Andrzej (Pulp Fiction) Sekula’s sharp, eerie cinematography, Jon Gary Steele’s realistically grungy production design, former Tangerine Dream-er Paul Haslinger’s edgy, exciting score and the terrific, Saul Bass-esque opening and closing credits by Picture Mill.
So yeah, there’s no way a phone cord yanked from a wall socket could be workably plugged back in. And if the power to a room in which a VCR was playing was shut off, the tape wouldn’t start up again when the juice came back on. And it’s hard to believe that the bad guys could disable a vehicle as they do halfway through the movie without one of the good guys spotting them. But it’s no small achievement that Vacancy can incorporate moments like these and still generate the tension and jolts that it does.
