Blu Ray Disks: Vacancy [Blu-ray]

Vacancy [Blu-ray] Review

David (Luke Wilson) and Amy (Kate Beckinsale) are a married couple in need of a place to stay as they are in the middle of nowhere. They stumble to a motel where they think they feel safe and more confortable as they have a TV with VCR to entertain them, but the videos shown are low budget slasher movies that actually are murder films. There's a secret about the motel that the owners are actually murderers who create snuff films for their pleasure, now David and Amy must find a way to escaped the motel from hell.

Intense and riviting psychological horror thriller from director Nimrod Antal and writer Mark L. Smith is a fun and very Alfred Hitchock-like suspenser. This one differs from the recent glut of torture flicks as it does focus on the plot and characterizations much like the original "SAW" movie but more to "Psycho" and 1980's underrated "Motel Hell". The film co-stars Ethan Embry and Frank Waley, it's a go-for-the-throat thriller that harkens back to the good old fashion psychological thriller days with suspense and twists.

This Blu-Ray gives a wonderful theatrical quality transfer on the image and terrific sound with a few extras like extended snuff films, featurette and deleted scenes.

Vacancy [Blu-ray] Overview

No Description Available.
Genre: Horror
Rating: R
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: Blu-Ray

Vacancy [Blu-ray] Specifications

A confined setting is a useful tool for thriller-makers, and Vacancy is definitely boxed in: a rundown motel way, way off the Interstate, the kind of place where unsuspecting movie characters go to get stabbed to death in the shower. If Vacancy doesn't quite live up to its Hitchcockian forbears, at least it provides 80 minutes of well-designed mayhem. You know somebody's paying attention just from the opening credits, a clever vortex with pounding music by Paul Haslinger. Then we meet unhappy couple Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, driving along in the dark and forced to stay at the Pinewood Motel after a car breakdown. There's a night man (Frank Whaley, decadent) in the tradition of Dennis Weaver's Touch of Evil gargoyle, but the real mess of trouble is waiting in room number 4. Director Nimrod Antal, who scored a stylish international hit with the Hungarian thriller Kontroll, squeezes maximum juice out of the Route 66 atmosphere of the motel, although the movie doesn't get under your skin the way Kontroll did. Wilson and Beckinsale are a little too marquee-namish for this kind of heavy-breathing work, and the script doesn't give them much to play with. But hey, it's not that kind of movie. Where it really belongs is on the top half of a drive-in double bill, or maybe as a nightmare-scenario TV movie from the Seventies. Either way, it works. --Robert Horton

Stills from Vacancy (click for larger image)