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The Innkeepers – Art 1/5 Ent 3/5 Worth 2/5
A haunted hotel movie, which you can only guess was made by the hotel’s staff while they were on their smoke breaks. There is a serious dearth of originality that ultimately sinks this film, and the low budget doesn’t give you much of a life raft after it hits the iceberg. But I want to refrain from kicking honest artists while they’re just starting out, especially when they pretty much hit what they were aiming for. I will credit the filmmakers for aiming for a goal of having some decent fun on a whim with a rudimentary outline. This is the kind of movie that reinvigorates people’s love for cinema acting not so much as an inspirational work, but simply from the fact that it exudes that obvious fun they had making it. Yeah, it isn’t The Exorcist. It isn’t even Blair Witch. The camera gets caught between both horror worlds of found footage and normal fly on the wall fare, again owing to the low budget. But there’s something redeeming in how unpretentious and unambitious The Innkeepers manages to come off. This is the film equivalent of a garage band’s demo tape.
But I do feel that if the filmmakers were suddenly flush with cash, they would have made something pretentious and ambitious, possibly even insulting. The inclusion of the babe from Top Gun as a psychic medium and failed actress was neat for precisely ten seconds. Kelly McGillis grew tired of kissing Tom Cruise while he was standing on a milk carton so I guess her career had to be cut off at the knees ever since. Joad Cressbeckler from The Onion News Network shows up as a spooky ghoulish elderly guest at the hotel, which was too jarringly funny to sit through to the conclusion without shaking my head.
A decent attempt that’s worth a look at 3AM, but there’s not much that’s inventive here.
