The creepy opening music, and black and white photos of the old guesthouse reeled me in right away.  Claire (Paxton) and nerdy Luke (Pat Healy) are manning the desk of this quiet, New England inn on its last weekend before it’s shut down for good.  Luke is busy setting up a website dealing with hauntings. He and Claire want to prove the existence of the ghost of Madeline O’ Malley who is said to haunt the place.  Keeping them company is Kelly McGillis, a guest at the inn.  She’s a former actress/turned psychic healer and is barely recognisable in this film.  McGillis has changed a lot since her Top Gun and Witness days.

The inn looks every inch like an old fashioned, haunted hotel. If I ever get to New England, I’ll be looking it up. The setting can’t be faulted but the slow pacing can.  I waited for ages for something to happen and when it did, it wasn’t very exciting.  This isn’t really a horror or a ghost story. It’s an old school drama with a few scares and some humour.  Even the music score is playful rather than scary.   For the most part, this is a pretty aimless film with very little action, mirroring the characters who are stuck in life and don’t know what to do with themselves when they finish this job.  We feel their boredom with the monotony of the hotel job and life in general.  If you worked the front desk of a near empty inn with only one co-worker for company and you pretty much had the run of the place, wouldn’t you start talking about ghosts and going looking for one just to relieve the boredom? I know I would.

While the third act did pack some scares, overall not much happens, but saying that, this is a nice film with lots of charm and I adored the setting. ***

 
So, seen any good haunted house/hotel movies lately?

******************

by guest blogger Katie Smogoleski

When I read the review for The Innkeepers, I immediately added it to my rental list. Cheesy horror? Check. ’70s vibe? Check. Haunted house? Check. B-list cast? Check and check. Unfortunately, for my husband Jason, there was only one hot chick, no car chases, and no Jason Statham hiding in the basement. Also unfortunate: the last movie we saw featuring said hot chick, Sara Paxton, was Shark Night 3D. Jason busted out a Miller Lite for this one.

The movie takes place at the Yankee Peddlar, a hundred-year-old inn that is open for one last night. Fun fact: The Yankee Peddlar Inn is the name of the place where director Ti West and his crew stayed while filming his indie horror, The House of the Devil, a previous selection in our “Scary Movie Sunday” series. The movie version of the Yankee Peddlar is said to be haunted by a bride who was stood up there on her wedding day. Note: Mrs. Havisham is scary in any context! Sara Paxton and Pat Healy play the inn’s only two employees, taking turns working shifts at the front desk and working each other into a legitimate panic. The inn has a few odd guests, including Kelly McGillis (Maverick’s lady love from Top Gun, circa 1986), who plays a stodgy character with ESP-like powers, and a mystery man who checks in and demands to stay in the honeymoon suite. This is a slow and near-tedious burn, to the point that Jason got a little trigger happy with the fast-forwarding, then grabbed another beer; there are some good scares as the innkeepers try to record and hear what’s happening with the ghost in the inn and are warned not to go into the basement. We could sense the isolation and claustrophobia, as 95% of the movie took place inside the inn. The movie effectively builds to a mostly satisfying ending that is a shock, if not a twist. I did need Jason to escort me to our basement to retrieve laundry from the dryer, but I did not need a night-light for bedtime. When I stated that the movie was a pretty solid scare, Jason replied with a sulky “I love you.” Compromise or payback for Crank: High Voltage? You be the judge. This is worth renting, but not buying.

The Yankee Pedlar Inn is soon closing its doors for the last time and two employees are left looking after the place while the owner suns himself on a beach on Barbados. Nerdy awkward Claire (Sara Paxton) and geeky college dropout Luke (Pat Healy) want to use the opportunity of the inn being nearly empty to explore the place for signs of ghosts. They are both staying at the hotel themselves so that they can swap shifts on the reception desk. Only one room is occupied, by a woman, who has left her husband for the weekend to teach him a lesson, and her young son.

Another guest arrives; Leanne Reese-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and Claire recognises her as a former TV actress because she’s fan. When Claire takes Lee some towels and tries to talk to her about how much she enjoyed her shows but Lee is just plain bitchy to her and leaves her feeling depressed.

That night Claire is alone at the desk and she decides to try a bit of amateur ghost hunting with a microphone and a tape recorder. She believes the ghost of Madeleine O’Malley haunts the inn after she hung herself when her fiancé left her on her wedding day many decades earlier. Now finally we start getting to the real haunting after a couple of jump scares. As she tries the tape recorder she hears static and faint sounds then a piano playing. There’s a piano in the reception are so she goes through to it and the sound stops. She slowly approaches the piano and something invisible plays two keys.

Claire run upstairs and bashes on the door of Luke’s room to wake him but he’s still half asleep and wants to wait until morning. As she heads downstairs Lee appears at her door to chide her for being so noisy. Claire apologizes then explains to her what she was doing. Lee invites Claire into her room gives her a drink and says she thinks she can help her. Since leaving acting Lee has become a spiritual healer and knows how to contact the spirits. She brings out her crystal pendulum and Claire asks the spirits questions. Lee doesn’t get a very clear answer from them but she does sense danger down the basement and warns Claire not to go down there.

I enjoyed this film. It takes its time to establish the characters and the setting and I felt drawn into the story and keeps the signs of haunting small at first and builds it up to the mad rush of fear at the end. It has some similarities to films like The Haunting by great use of sound to suggest rather than relying on showing CGI spirits. It also focuses completely on Claire and gives the film an ambiguity about whether things are really happening or Claire is just imagining it all.

Rating 7.5/10

Related articles

• IMDb
• Rotten Tomatoes
• Wikipedia
• The Innkeepers (noframeof.wordpress.com)
• The Innkeepers – review (guardian.co.uk)
• The Innkeepers (2011) (noeltanti.com)

What are all these sharks doing here? 

Fuck this film.

After the success of Piranha 3D in 2010, the inevitable happened: a whole host of geniuses decided to copy the formula laid out in Piranha and then translate it for other large hungry fish. Obviously, the biggest, scariest and hungriest is the noble shark, and so it was inevitable that one of the first out of the blocks would be Shark Night 3D.

Does not contain a single solitary boob sighting, but does contain spoilers below:

 For those that don’t know, the large and angry fish movie should in theory be one of the easiest forms of schlock to bash out. Take one group of idiots, place on the water somewhere and expose them to the hunger of a big and scary fish. Some large fish have cachet automatically, such as sharks and piranhas and whatnot, others are more difficult such as the stupid hungry chinese thing in Frankenfish. However, generally, as a rule you can’t really go wrong with ludicrously oversized sharks.

Don’t get excited. This is almost as close to boob as the film gets.

Once you’ve placed your cast of disposable cretins in harm’s way, then the following essential ingredients should be added: Alcohol consumption, nudity, gore by the bucket load, cheap laughs. If you get the quantities balanced properly, then it is possible to turn in a ludicrously entertaining film. Although I do not want to see scenes with our victims crossing open stretches of water on suspended ropes that then dip perilously close to the drink and therefore the carnivorous bastard under it ever again.

Given the simplicity of the formula, I always find it frankly astonishing how difficult it is to translate to the big screen. The number of good hungry fish movies is almost infinitesimally small (Deep Blue Sea, Piranha 3D, and the daddy: Jaws) compared to the sheer volume of absolute fucking stinkers out there. Still, at the very least it should be possible to drag something hilarious out of even the worst films- the epic “I EAT YOUR HEART” scene in Frankenfish is a good example of this.

Occasionally, though, a fish film comes that just fails on every conceivable level. I’m told that this year’s Piranha 3DD (pathetic and juvenile title) is such a film, but before that, last year’s Shark Night 3D set the bar particularly low. How is this possible? It’s not brain surgery, rocket science or even some combination of the two of them, it should be as easy as hitting water when you fall out of a boat, and yet the sheer number of crushingly lame fish films out there suggests that it might actually be quite hard.

Taking a shot in the dark, I’d say this was a shark.

In this case, the premise is inordinately stupid. College nerd Nick (Dustin Milligan) is friends with uber-jock Malik (Sinqua Walls). He’s dragged away from his X-box along with buddy Gordon (Joel David Moore) for a weekend at Sara’s (The Innkeepers’ Sara Paxton) plush lakehouse. Accompanying them are piece of tattooed filth Beth (Katherine McPhee), cretinous male model Blake (Chris Zylka) and Malik’s love Maya (Alyssa Diaz). After a run in with the local sherrif (Donal Logue) and Sara’s ex Dennis and his redneck buddy Red (Chris Carmack and Joshua Leonard respectively), they settle in for some beer and some water related antics.

Unfortunately for Malik, he’s showing off while wakeboarding when a big fucking shark pops up out of nowhere and has his right arm. This sends our group into a panic, as they now are on the clock. Can they get Malik back to safety, without further loss of limbs? So, with that, Nick, Maya, Sara and Malik set off in the boat. Shark attacks and Maya is turned into chum. Through an act of fuckuppery rating at 9.7 on the fumbletrumpet scale, they total the boat. Malik, Sara and Nick drag themselves back to the house, because for reasons best known to themselves they turned the boat round and were surprisingly close when it blew up. 1-0 to the fish.

“My god! Is that a shark?”

Meanwhile (this word will come up quite a lot), Beth has a nervous breakdown of some description and Dennis and Red turn up- ostensibly to give them a lift to the nearest major hospital. Sara reveals that Dennis tried to drown her, so she ran his face over with a propeller (although you can’t tell), so you’d think that letting Beth and Gordon go off with him may be a bad idea. Nevertheless, they go through with it. Half way across the lake, Dennis and Red stop the boat to reveal that they are filming some kind of shady reality TV “When Sharks Attack” thing, and they’ve been letting the sharks into the lake to eat tourists. What a dastardly plan. Anyhoo, they shoot Gordon, who manages to swim to a mangrove tree, before a shark breaches and has him in one. However, he has it easy compared to Beth, who they strip down to her underwear and then stuff her in a net full of cookiecutter sharks. These things are, in terms of hungry fish films, possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Anyhow, despite that she could quite easily have got out of the enclosed area, she stays around and lets them eat her. So, on the half time whistle, it’s 3-0 to the sharks.

Meanwhile (see), back at the house, Malik has gone a bit nuts. He’s found a spear from somewhere (eh?) and is marching into the water to show the Shark the “West Baltimore” (aye, via fucking Julliard) way. Eventually, he gets in a hilarious fight with a hammerhead shark, and with a bit of help from Nick and Sara, stabs it in the head with his spear. Malik’s late consolation goal registers a kill for the humans making  it now 3-1 to the sharks.

Blake enters the game. His genius plan is to ride a jetski to hospital with Malik on his back. Needless to say, this goes badly, and Malik sacrifices himself to save his buddy (4-1 to the Sharks). Blake carries on at a rate of knots crying havoc with the sharks of hell on his tail. Just as it looks like he’s about to make it, a big fucking Great White jumps out of the water and fucks him up good and proper (5-1 to the Sharks).

Don’t worry, he’s ‘armless. Sorry.

The Sherrif turns up, and reveals himself to be playing on the same team as Dennis, Red and the fish. The species traitor. Anyway, he sedates Nick and Sara, and tries to lower Nick into a shark infested tank on a chair. Luckily, Nick is super cunning  and using a Zippo that defies the laws of physics is able to set the fat cop on fire and tip him in the tank with the fish. 5-2 to the Sharks.

Meanwhile, Sara is in a bit of shit. Dennis, apparently, is still holding a grudge about that whole propeller incident, and they’ve called for a late substitution in the form of a Great White. Pausing only to throw her pet dog overboard (fucking hilarious scene), he plans to stuff Sara in a shark cage, cover her with gore and let the big Saffa go to work on her. This, in theory, is a plan WITH ABSOLUTELY NO DRAWBACKS WHATSOEVER!! Well, it isn’t but you get the idea. Nick turns up on the boat (eh?) with the Sherrif’s gun. No sooner does Dennis sacrifice Red (own goal, but that makes it 5-3 to the sharks), hilariously, when in a punch up with Nick he’s knocked overboard. Nick goes to rescue Sara, but the evil wannabe reality TV mogul isn’t dead. Instead he drops the Shark cage sending both him and Sara into harms way. Sadly, he didn’t plan this one out properly at all, and the Great White fucks him. (5-4). Sara, clearly Aquaman’s daughter given how long she can hold her breath) is being snapped at by the great white before Nick pops up to score a late equaliser for humanity. Our hero and heroine escape. With their dog, which the fish turned its nose up at.

I think this may also be a shark. Just not the one we saw earlier.

This is clearly shite, hence my slightly facetious keeping score. The writing is dismal, with nary a decent laugh, the acting (aside from Paxton) is best described as somnambulent, and the direction and effects are all over the place. Because it was filmed in THREE FUCKING D the film spends an inordinate amount of time pointlessly poking things at the camera, which is massively irritating. Nevertheless, I could let it off all of that, if it realised that it was a stupid schlocky fish eats people film. It doesn’t, annoyingly, so for some fucking inane reason best known to the studio, Shark Night 3D was filmed for a PG13 certificate. Therefore, we’ve got the most boring and straightlaced Shark film out there- there’s not a single solitary boob sighting in the entire run time (Boooooooooo!) and the gore is simply fucking pathetic.

The calling card scene is obviously meant to be Beth in with the little sharks, and it is, just not for the reasons that they intended. This sequence is a nigh-on perfect example of everything that’s wrong with the film. Firstly, she should be naked, or at the very least topless. These are murderous redneck scumbags, are you honestly telling me that they’d strip her down to her underwear and then allow her to keep her bra on to save her modesty? Secondly, she could easily escape the fish. Easily. Thirdly, the little sharks themselves, while quite a scary idea as they’re a sort of death by 1000 cuts thing, are some of the most disgustingly shitty CGI that I’ve seen in a while. This 5 minute sequence encapsulates the total lameness and point-missing shiteness of the entire fucking film.

I really wasn’t joking about her being Aquaman’s daughter. She holds her breath for about 20 minutes here.

Nevertheless, it isn’t an Orangutan of Doom effort. Malik punching the Hammerhead with his good arm is hilariously stupid, as is throwing Fido overboard, while Paxton’s acting is streets ahead of the rest of the cast. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, enough to make up for the utterly hopeless rest of the film.

Overall, I don’t recommend this. Shark Night 3D is an almost perfect example of how not to make a hungry fish film. Quite why you would make something as ridiculous as this and then neuter it with a kiddie rating is one of life’s mysteries. Basically, if you’re going to make a piece of intentional marine schlock, then you make it balls out- maximum nudity, maximum gore, and throw the curse words around. You do not, frankly, make a lame and nutless effort that’s as much fun as spending an afternoon memorising Pi to as many decimals as you can. This is shit, and that’s the rating it’s getting.

What a failure.

Until next time,

Jarv

]]> http://sitdown-and-shut-up.com/2012/06/30/the-innkeepers/ Sat, 30 Jun 2012 12:15:30 +0000 michaelkenneth http://sitdown-and-shut-up.com/2012/06/30/the-innkeepers/ 2011, dir. Ti West

Indie horror. Two words designed to scare the living shit out of any film reviewer these days – and sadly, not for the reasons you’d hope. It’s a sub genre that’s given us stone hard classics like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Last Broadcast and The Blair Witch Project, but nowadays it’s the refuge of the formulaic. A load of scare tactics that were once new and interesting, but have since had all ingenuity and imagination boiled off. Then The Innkeepers lands on your mat. And you remember why you love horror in the first place.

Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are a pair of minimum wage clerks, manning an old New England hotel through its final weekend of operations. The top floor’s already been stripped and there are only a handful of guests staying. Working 7-7 shifts, Claire and Luke use their spare time to investigate rumours that the hotel is haunted.

There’s nothing upsetting about the presence of ghosts – we’ve been too long brought up on such stories to take fright at them. It’s the possibility of their presence which disturbs. The walking of that line between the rational and the perverse, the thought that we’re probably right that it’s all a load of mumbo jumbo, but on the other hand we might just not be. That’s why The Innkeepers scares and something like Poltergeist doesn’t. I’m scared that something might be there, not that is. The film isn’t above jump shocks – it employs them throughout – but has the confidence to realise something gently executed can have an even bigger impact than a sudden cut and scream of music.

Genre fans will appreciate the references. The suggestion that the haunting may be as much a product of the victims’ psyches as it is any actual ghosts evokes The Shining by way of Repulsion, whilst the investigations of Claire and Luke hark right back to Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape. One particular scare is lifted from the classic BBC ghost story Whistle and I’ll Come to You; an unprepossessing but impossible presence which scares because the world, the score and the director don’t seem to care that what is happening is wrong.

It is, though, the characters which make the piece – and it’s sad how unusual that feels in a horror film. Ti West’s direction, and the performances of Paxton and Healy, capture the discontent of anyone who’s ever done a minimum wage job. A lack of fulfilment and proper motivation can be a crushing burden, but too abstract to properly confront. Mundane frustrations – like trying to get a leaky rubbish bag into a bin – can capture that despair in microcosm. Anyone who has ever felt they are trapped in an interim of life will find it very easy to relate to Claire.

The Innkeepers is not just scary, it’s also smart, funny and sweet. Not only its aspirations, but also its achievements are so far beyond the standard indie horror fare. It draws on a trove of classic inspirations and deserves to be compared to every one. Sleep tight and don’t the uncertainty bite.

Follow @call_me_kenneth

Two minimum-wage twenty-somethings – wannabe ghost-spotters in their spare time – attempt to capture the alleged ghostly goings-on of a soon-to-be-closed New England hotel, The Yankee Pedlar Inn. Director Ti West’s impressively understated film is bolstered by a great lead performance, an awesome original score and a genuine sense of creepiness throughout.

Never one to turn down the chance to watch an indie horror, I often find myself disappointed in what the genre as a whole has to offer. That said, the era of popularized “torture porn” seems to be slowly ebbing away – thankfully – and good old-fashioned creepy ghost stories seem to be back in fashion: take the hugely successful British hit The Woman in Black, for example. After hearing some positive web buzz about it, I was happy to find Ti West’s low-budget 2011 film The Innkeepers due to be released on blu-ray this past Monday. The film exceeded expectations across the board, and would seem to herald the arrival of an original new voice in a dilapidated genre.

Director and writer Ti West’s modus operandi seems to that of taking worn-out concepts and reviving them with a retro twist, as evidenced in his previous work The House of the Devil (2009), and The Innkeepers is similar in this regard. The faded, 90s look of the film is in perfect harmony to Jeff Grace’s shrill musical composition – somewhat reminiscient of both Ghostbusters (1986) and The Shining (1980), the latter in particular evoked several times – a gift, perhaps, for those horror aficionados paying closer attention. The adorable Claire (Sara Paxton) leads the films cast, a somewhat geeky heroine who is easy to like and relate to, with her ever-so-slightly naive but lovable persona lending real gravitas to the films ability to shock; we can only sympathize with Claire and the increasingly-stressful situations she finds herself in, a put-upon minimum wage hotel employee finding herself increasingly hassled by the guests, the ghosts, even the annoying girl in the coffee-shop. At the heart of the movie is a sense of leading curiosity and most of all a sense of humour – quietly confident in itself and its ability to scare at will. Ti West gets the best out of the small cast and dictates the pace of the film with aplomb, keeping you waiting for every jump, often agonizingly so.

The Innkeepers is both entertaining and different and a lot of fun. It’s smart, character-centric horror, a treat for those who have ever searched for “scary videos” on google looking for a late night scare, or stayed up past midnight with the lights off for tales of the paranormal; short on gore, perhaps, but effective, funny, atmospheric and unashamedly individual. I hope for more of the same from West and company in future releases.

It’s clear early on that these three very different folks are not there by chance.  We have the scrappy thief, Jody (Sara Paxton), solid and reliable, Tom (Scott Eastwood) and annoying, Samantha (Katherine Waterston).  Tom tries diligently to find a way out of the woods, but no matter what direction he takes each day, he ends up back at the cabin.  Something or someone doesn’t want them to escape.  When they eventually get around to discussing where they were headed before finding themselves lost, it turns out, quite chillingly, that each member of this stranded group believes they are in a different state. So where exactly are they?  Did someone knock them over the head and drop them in these woods, or is there something weirder going on?  I heard the Twilight Zone music in my mind as this conversation was taking place.

The first scene, a hold up in a service station doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what follows, a young woman (Samantha) stumbling terrified through the woods, but fear not, it all comes together in the end.  I figured out what was going on forty minutes in and was quite pleased with myself, though I’m sure many others will have copped it earlier.  I don’t want to give too much away, but it was Samantha’s coat that kept drawing my attention. I did not like Samantha at first, at all.  She’s stuck out in the woods and asks Tom if there is a bathroom anywhere.  Talk about letting the side down for all women.

Enter Nowhere is slow moving for the first half hour, with questionable acting (Sam being the worst), but it kept me entertained, and it had a nice twist. Think horror meets science fiction and you’ll get the tone of this movie.   The cinematography is attractive and the mystery quite intriguing.  Hints are dropped from the start and when you think back later you’ll wonder why you didn’t guess what was really happening sooner. I’m giving it *** because of the slow pacing and less than top notch acting, although Tom is very easy on the eyes, which made watching this enjoyable enough.  He’s Clint Eastwood’s son and he’s got his father’s rugged good looks.

Do not look at the trailer for this on YouTube. Whoever was behind this production decided to reveal the twist.  Moron!

Check it out on Amazon HERE

Have you heard of this one?  I like watching the more obscure horror films. If anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know.

************

Goofy, stupid film with a silly, borderline cartoonish plot full of clichés, bad dialogue, and illogical/incomprehensible story elements that would have made for a truly terrible film were it not for the great cinematography, a few choice moments of genuine terror, and a great, great performance from lead girl Sara Paxton. Man can that girl act, even in a role as annoyingly written as this one was. She’s arguably the heart of the film, stupid over the top theatrics and all, and is certainly an actress to watch. The girl’s going places.

The film, though, is all over the place. The beginning is this big goofy sitcom type deal with Paxton and her creepy 40-year-old coworker buddy love interest whatever the hell playing pranks on one another and joking around, oh and they also look for ghosts for some reason, which is fine, whatever, but these scenes make up 2/3rds of the film and function mostly as padding to make up for an obvious lack of story. It all gets very old very fast. Then the scares finally come in and yes, they’re tense and yes, they’re scary, but **SPOILERS** Paxton’s character does such obviously stupid things, and the motivations of the ghosts are so poorly and confusingly defined, **END SPOILERS** that you just don’t give as much of a damn as you should.

The biggest problem of the film, ultimately, is the plot, which is so thread thin and poorly developed that it’s almost laughable. Most of it doesn’t even make sense. This is a haunted house movie, for crying out loud; how hard could it possibly be to come up with a half decent plot? The things practically write themselves! You’re not reinventing the wheel here, nor are you expected to do so. Just come up with a half decent back story for your ghosts, stick them in an enclosed space with a few sexy but naïve teenagers/young adults, throw away the key, and bam, you have yourself a movie. See? Not hard.

Anyway, stupid film, terribly written, but well shot and acted, and scary at times, but not enough to justify the poor plot/characters. A disappointment given how great “House of the Devil,” this director’s previous film, was. That movie didn’t have much of a plot either, but what it lacked in forward momentum it more than made up for in tension and genuine scares. The man definitely has an eye for visuals, and is very good with actors, he just needs to work on his writing.

Over the course of five features, director Ti West has carved out a big name out for himself. His stylised take on horror has marked him out as a contrary voice in the genre. His 2009 film, House of the devil, announced his arrival on a grand scale and in 2012 he has unleashed his follow-up, the innkeepers. While immediately more divisive than his break out hit, his latest film keeps the young directors style intact.

Innkeepers is about the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a hotel that has been a fixture in Connecticut for generations upon generations and West’s film takes place on the final day of business. With only a few guests to speak of, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are covering the last night shift which gives them plenty of opportunity to investigate whether the historical hotel is haunted by Madeline O’Malley.

This film is dividing opinion for a very simple reason, this isn’t scary in a traditional sense and any leaning towards the accepted norms of the genre comes in the final twenty minutes. Too sudden and ineffective would be all the ammunition necessary to class this is a bad film. For genre fans it is clear to see why this is a difficult film to get on with: it’s slow paced, the scares are erratic and ‘not much happens’. To that end, it would be easy to debate that Ti West latest film is a horror film for people who don’t the genre, it could also be debated that this is more dramatic than a genre piece. Those would be reasonable conclusions, but it would shirk the films great strength, the build-up.

The build-up gives Innkeepers a common thread with Kubrick’s classic, the shining. Both the overlook hotel and the Yankee pedlar inn are almost entirely vacant and maybe nothing is seen, maybe everything is eventually seen. The important point to stress is that sense of dread that is the unseen, that promise and potential for unease which is disarming. No scene exemplifies this better than Paxton’s piano discovery. While it is true that the film would be scarier if Jeff Grace’s gorgeously ominous soundtrack announced the arrival of the ghosts more blatantly. However, if that was true it would be undercutting the subtle tones and atmosphere of the composers work and the slow escalation of character in West’s brilliant script.

Subtlety is the defining feature. Most of the running time is spent with the two members of staff talking about normal things, the everyday, things that normal people talk about giving value to one of the many taglines: “A Ghost Story for the Minimum Wage”. While there is no central thread as strong as the itch of curiosity to answer the mysterious unanswered questions of the Yankee pedlar inn, it is in the drama where the film comes to life.

West’s witty script of brilliant tension, interaction and tragedy together with the fantastic low-key performances from Sara Paxton and Pat Healy elevate the film beyond the disappointment of horror buffs. Paxton to this point in her career has been a ‘scream-queen’ and one of the recurring cast members of the grim Wayans brothers spoofs. Here she is a character, more so than that, she feels like a real person with real problems, fears and inadequacies. The same is true of Healy, even though he has less screen time; he is the same combination of neuroses and ambition. It’s this sort of symbiosis between script and actor that makes this world feel real and not one dipped in artifice and expendable fodder for the greater demands of jump scares and gore.

The Innkeepers delivers perfectly on a human level. Whether Paxton and Healy are talking about the terrible customers and unbeknownst to them, the creepy harbingers of doom who occupy the second and third act, it all builds up to a crescendo. All these convergent threads make the innkeepers the antithesis to poorly scripted genre films the world over. The only saggy scene is when Claire (Paxton) goes out of the hotel and down the road to the coffee shop where Lena ‘everyone’s least favourite mumblecore patron’ Dunham works.

The mixed reception expresses this point perfectly; this is not a film for everyone. The Innkeepers is hard to digest, slow and lacking in the explicit allures of the genre. However at the same time, West is calling back to the period of classic cinema when horror wasn’t just about the visceral immediate reaction, it was about something that lingered in the memory long after the closing credits. It was about people.

Most of the hotel is empty for the final two days, with just a woman and her son, an ex-actress called Leanne Rease-Jones who has turned to healing and divining, and a strange old man staying, who was very insistent on the room he wanted on the third floor.

Claire is keen on proving that Madeline is haunting the inn now that there’s very little time left, and uses Luke’s EVP recording equipment to walk around the ground floor listening to the ambient noise to see if she can hear any ghostly messages. A faint sound of a piano being played comes through, leading her to the grand piano in the main entrance, and when she’s stood looking at it one of the piano keys is pressed down, her first contact from Madeline. The action focuses a lot more around Claire than Luke, who seems strangely unbothered about making maximum use of ghost hunting opportunities seen as the hotel will be closing in two days, and she works as a focus for the gathering of tension through having an excitable but also insatiable character where creepy incidents only serve to make her want even more to find out about the inn’s ghost. This grows even more when Leanne contacts the spirits and warns Claire away from the basement, which is where Madeline’s body was kept for three days after she was found, but of course Claire then wants to go down there to find out what happened.

This is a different sort of horror story for the majority of the film from other haunted house style films and revolves more around a very gradual build up with comic banter and Claire shrieking and falling over a lot because a bird flies at her or Luke creeps up behind her etc, and if you’re in the mood I think it works well to keep your attention. It reminded me a bit of The Shining, but with less characterisation and a couple of basic horror movie jumps and scares. The acting is very good from everybody in the small cast – Claire and Luke are played by experienced actors, Sara Paxton and Pat Healy, who have been in a couple of well-known films, and they work well as a slightly geeky and socially awkward team of college dropouts who have a strong interest in the supernatural, and the banter and horseplay between them keeps the film buoyant despite the fact that very little is happening. The old man, played by George Riddle, is wonderfully creepy, quietly insistent that he wants a particular room where he spent his honeymoon and you can tell it’s not going to end happily. However, The Innkeepers is a bit slow and in the final quarter of the film it shifts from little noises and doors swinging shut to bog standard woman in a wedding dress hanging from the ceiling, white eyes staring at the camera, people running about in a dark basement and things looming out and so on, and then bang, it’s over.

This all means that we actually don’t find out anything. Leanne at one point mentions three ghosts and insinuates that there’s more to Madeline’s story than Claire knows, but this isn’t mentioned again from this point, and the old man’s link to the hotel makes little sense regarding the rest of the plot as he isn’t connected at all to Madeline who died in the 1800s.

The cast is very small, which can work well in building a clostrophobic environment, but although Claire is an interesting character to lead the film with her awkward manner and need to have a purpose to her life, I think everybody else is underused.

The back story of Madeline could have been fleshed out a bit more, with the whispers she hears maybe leading Claire to finding evidence of what happened, or maybe have her see flashbacks of the hotel in Madeline’s time like The Shining, and therefore freeing the ghost and then we wouldn’t have to see dead brides hanging from the ceiling or ghosts at all, which for the majority of horror films just makes the quality drop, and there would also be a sense of closure at the end.

Overall, I think The Innkeepers had promise, and a good cast and location, but it takes too long to kick into gear and then leaves us with a pointless ending.

Sara Paxton is one of a handful of guests who attempt to contact the dead bride that apparently stalks a remote hotel’s corridors (Picture: Dark Sky Films)

You wait ages for a decent haunted house movie and then two come along at once. This time it’s a real hotel in Torrington, Connecticut, called the Yankee Pedlar Inn.

Writer/director Ti West stayed there while shooting his 2009 horror The House Of The Devil and, having been creeped out by a couple of faulty light bulbs, he decided it was a great place to set a ghost story.

The story he returned with is simple: with only a handful of guests booked for the inn’s final weekend as a going concern, a skeleton staff pass the idle hours by trying to contact the dead bride that apparently stalks the hotel corridors.

The setting and horror-comedy style is deliberately mid-1980s but superior 1960s TV shows such as The Twilight Zone would have wrapped this skinny mystery up in half an hour. Still, if the climax is not worth the wait, the wait itself is worth the admission price.

Both Sara Paxton and Pat Healy are quietly hilarious as the McJobs-turned-Ghostbusters, while West showcases the sure touch that has him tipped for big things.

VIDEO: Watch the trailer for The Innkeepers

I was a little unsure of what I would think of it, as I didn’t care for Ti West’s Cabin Fever 2, and despite wanting to like his House of the Devil, I just felt that it was a little dull.

I loved that House was an homage to 80s horror films, set in the 80s, and featured some classic tunes by The Fixx, but I just kept waiting for something to happen, and when it finally did in the last five minutes or so, I was a little beyond caring, which is too bad because the last 5 minutes are pretty sweet.

However, with The Innkeepers, Ti West finds the balance between character, jumps, creepiness and fun that I felt was lacking in House (which I do plan to watch again and give it another shot).

The Yankee Pedlar is getting ready to close it’s doors, and the two young employees left to tend its last weekend, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) decide to spend it documenting paranormal activity and ghost hunting. It seems a young bride Madeline O’Malley was brutally murdered there… and has never left, haunting the hotel.

The two employees are held up in their investigations by a small selection of guests, a mother and child (who Claire tells spooky stories too – and then doesn’t understand why the mother gets upset with her), a washed up actor turned medium, Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis) and an old man, who spent his honeymoon in the hotel (and I felt really saddened by his fate – no spoilers though).

The film isn’t scary, so much as it is creepy, and it definitely comes down on the side of creepiest hotel film since The Shining in my book.

The two leads play pranks on one another (the first one when Luke shows Claire a video recording is awesome), laugh, and drink, which alternately puts you on edge or laugh out loud.

The poster to the left definitely plays up this more fun aspects of the film, while the one up top indulges the creepiness.

Sara Paxton’s Claire is a fun character, a twenty-something stuck in a dull job, and tries with Luke to make the most of it.

The camerawork is very well done, with slow pans and dollies through the hotel, always making you wonder when or if something is going to happen. And where in House of the Devil, there’s not a lot of payoff to those shots, this film, more often than not, pays off each and every time.

The only real drawback I had to the film was that anytime something spooky was going to happen, or the filmmakers wanted you to think it was going to happen they introduce a bass rumble to the film’s audio track to make you uneasy and jumpy, which is too bad, cause I think the film could’ve done that on its own.

This isn’t a horror movie for you and your friends to see and chat with all the way through, this is something to cuddle up with someone on the couch, turn the lights off, and submerge yourself into the experience of the film. It works really well that way.

If Ti West continues making films like this, establishing atmosphere and creep factor instead of going for the easy jump scares (though there are a couple of those in this film, but they work because the atmosphere is there), then I’ll be watching them.

I highly recommend this film for someone who wants something a little different from the run of the mill horror films, and is willing to let the story, the characters, and the atmosphere creep you out, as opposed to gore, and endless cheap scares.

I had a lot of fun with it, what did you think of it?