Vacancy

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Vacancy, a 2007 film, starring Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson, was not a complete waste of time. It's no classic, but it's a tense thriller. Credit is due to director Nimrod Antal, but mostly to writer Mark L. Smith, who wrote a script that is free of a lot of the cliches and intelligence-insulting habits of most movies of this type.

Wilson and Beckinsale play a bickering couple on a long, late-night drive (we later learn they are on the brink of divorcing and have lost a child). Wilson has decided to get off the Interstate (sort of a cliche) and in swerving to avoid a raccoon does something to his car. They end up at a run-down motel, and despite the general creepiness of the proprietor (Frank Whalley), decide to suck it up and spend the night. The script presents this as the only alternative, though a line referencing Psycho or Norman Bates would have been good.

The couple quickly realize that the motel makes its money by using unsuspecting patrons as subjects in snuff films, and the rest of the film has our intrepid travelers trying to avoid getting knifed to death. It's one of those one-set, limited cast scripts that are constantly being called for on screenwriting Web sites, but I enjoyed this one for a few reasons. One, the imperiled characters are not stupid, and almost every choice they make is the reasonable one. Two, the killers are not superhuman in their ability to defy the laws of physics or medicine (a problem in the otherwise good Joy Ride).

The very ending does go on for a beat too long and does have a medically-unsound moment, and the behavior by a policeman would suggest he's forgotten all he learned at the academy, but all in all the action of this film is not too outside of what could happen in the real world, which contributes to its over-all effectiveness. It's a good one to watch on a dark and stormy night.