Vacancy

When their car breaks down just outside Nowheresville, USA, bickering couple Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale have no alternative but to bed down at the seedy local motel. And…? With a set-up that familiar, a half-decent twist’s clearly required, so, as the couple kick back, hubby finds a seemingly discarded videotape, which reveals that the very room in which they’re staying has been used by the proprietor to shoot snuff movies with understandably unwilling previous guests. Clearly, they’re next in line unless they can outwit their tormentors.Sadly, that’s just about the point where the picture runs out of juice, degenerating into a mechanical exercise in shunting the characters around from set-piece to set-piece, yet, with only two potential victims with which to toy, the story options prove predictably limited. Creepy motel manager Frank Whaley’s the pick of a relatively able cast, and Hungarian director Nimród Antal (who made the stylish ‘Kontroll’ in Budapest) throws the camera around with abandon, but all concerned are on a hiding to nothing since the material’s so flimsy and underdeveloped. It’s not pretty, but it’s certainly vacant.