31 Screams in October, Vol. 3, #18: Vacancy (2007)

Director: Nimród Antal

Starring: Luke Wilson, Kate Beckinsale, Frank Whaley, Ethan Embry

You would think that, by now, horror movie characters would be wise enough never to stay the night in some cheap, middle-of-nowhere motel. They certainly had not as of 2007. “Psycho” will be foremost on most viewers minds when tuning in to watch “Vacancy.” But the comparisons both begin and end with the film’s setting. The actual plot of “Vacancy” plays out more like a home invasion angle, except that the home in question is the villains’ domain, and it’s up to the protagonists to figure out all of its little nooks and crannies.

David (Luke Wilson) and Amy Fox (Kate Beckinsale) are a estranged couple whose marriage has never recovered from the tragic loss of their son. Not even reaching the violent part of the story, and already the film is taking a downbeat tone. On their way back from some family get-together, their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere (i.e. where their cell phones are of no use). They had stopped at an auto repair garage, but the friendly mechanic (Ethan Embry) appears to have not found the car’s actual problem. Making their way back on foot, the Foxes decide to stay the night at the motel across the street from the garage. Immediately, they can hear a woman’s screams coming from the office, which the motel’s manager (Frank Whaley) insists are coming from the TV. The manager, who looks like a cross between Ned Flanders and Walter White, offers the honeymoon suite. But all that Amy and David really want is a place to get some sleep.

Once in their room, which is as disgusting as one can imagine, the couple is prevented from resting by someone in the adjacent room banging on the walls and the doors. The phone keeps ringing as well. Unwilling to put up with such harassment, David goes to the manager to inform him of the situation. At first, his story is met with confusion, as there are allegedly no other guests booked for the night, but the manager swears to look into it. No longer sleepy and bored out of his mind, David notices the stack of VHS tapes on top of the TV (which does not appear hooked up for cable channels). Each tape is unmarked, and contains on them scenes of unspeakable violence. Amy demands that the TV be turned off, but something about the tapes has caught David’s attention. It’s not the scenes of violence, but the location in which they are filmed… right inside the very room in which David and Amy are staying!

Finding cameras hidden throughout the room, they realize that their every move is being watched, and that they are the intended victims for the next snuff film. They try to run, but find men in masks waiting outside. Returning to the room, Amy attempts to distract the men while David bolts for the pay phone outside. But David quickly discovers that the phone is connected to the motel’s front office, and exits the booth just in time as the masked men crash into the booth with their car. With David now back in the room, they hear a truck pull up in the parking lot and try to get the driver’s attention. But David and Amy soon come to realize that the driver is a customer who is there to pick up copies of the videotapes. Realizing that they won’t find help from outside, David and Amy continue to work on a plan of escape. David starts to think about how the killers on the video seem to appear out of nowhere and figures out that they’ve been using a system of trapdoors. One of these tunnels up through their motel room’s bathroom floor.

Using the tunnels, David and Amy make their way over to the main office, where they find the manager’s surveillance system and a working phone. But they don’t get very far with the emergency call before they have to bail, leaving the phone off the hook, thus alerting the manager to their presence. He sends the masked men into the tunnels to go after them, forcing them to follow an alternative route. This leads them across the street to the garage, where they barricade the trapdoor with a heavy shelf. Just then, a sheriff’s deputy arrives in response to the emergency call. Asking the manager to allow him to inspect the motel rooms, the officer discovers what really goes on in this place, and that seals his fate. He tries to leave with David and Amy, but is killed, forcing the couple back to one of the rooms.

David has a plan which involves Amy hiding inside the ceiling, where she is forced to watch helplessly as David is stabbed moments after opening the door. The assailants, including the manager, film David as he appears to pass out from the pain. As morning arrives, Amy climbs down and commandeers the killers’ car. One of them jumps onto the roof. In an effort to fend him off, Amy crashes the car into one of the motel rooms. This not only kills the masked man on the roof but also crushes the one standing inside the room… who turns out to be the auto mechanic.

Running to the main office, Amy finds a gun, which had been David’s plan. She almost reaches it, but is attacked from behind by the irate manager. The manager has the upper hand, but he makes the mistake of tossing Amy right where the gun has landed on the ground. Amy picks it up and fires several times. The manager drops dead. Incredibly, David has survived the night, barely, and Amy stays with him as she waits for the police (whom she has just called for) to arrive.

“Vacancy” is a mostly unremarkable horror movie which is aided heavily by its talented, small cast. Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale are both likable no matter the quality of the film they participate in. Beckinsale has proven in the past that she is fully capable of playing strong female characters, which is why it comes as no surprise when Amy is able to fend for herself against her would-be attackers. Perhaps understated is Frank Whaley’s performance as the motel manager. Known mostly for goofy, weak characters, he also can play psychotic well enough. He’s no Anthony Perkins, but he makes for a creepy villain whose eventual death you cheer on.

The only thing stopping you from getting something out of watching “Vacancy” is the notion that this will all seem familiar. Indeed, “Vacancy” doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. It’s rare these days for any horror film to touch on a subject which hasn’t been covered over and over (and over) again. It won’t do anything for motels that “Psycho” didn’t do first. If that doesn’t particularly bother you, and if you like one or all of the cast members involved, then “Vacancy” doesn’t have to work very hard to hook you.

Career Opportunities (1991)

Director: Bryan Gordon

Starring: Frank Whaley, Jennifer Connelly, Dermot Mulroney, Kieran Mulroney, Noble Willingham, John M. Jackson

Gentlemen, why do I get the sneaking suspicion that most night jobs aren’t anywhere near this exciting? I’ve never worked at night, don’t see myself working at night, and generally just don’t like being out of the house after dark if I can help it. Still, we take the work which we can get. Hard labor for minimum wage is supposed to be character building, and maybe sometimes it is. Other times it’s just a pain in the ass. Break bone for the Man and he won’t care. You’re expendable. We take these mind-numbingly boring jobs not out of choice, but out of necessity.

Jim Dodge (Frank Whaley) is really trying his father’s patience. He’s managed to get himself fired yet again. “That’s got to be some kind of record,” more than one person observes. Jim is in his 20’s and is nowhere close to getting married or even leaving home. He finds it hard to understand why he should leave when he loves his family, enjoys his mom’s cooking, and has a comfortable bed to sleep in. But his dad (John M. Jackson) is concerned that Jim will never make anything of himself if he continues living this way, so he finds Jim a job opening at the local Target… as the “Night Clean-Up Boy.” While on his first night there, Jim is locked in by his gun-toting, hard-ass superior and unexpectedly joined by Josie McClellan (Jennifer Connelly), the girl of his dreams from his high school days. Josie still lives at home, too, only her rich father (Noble Willingham) is so caught up in business dealings and in how he’ll look among other rich snobs that he hasn’t taken the time to truly know his daughter. As a result, Josie has decided to become a shoplifter, not because she wants the undergarments she’s stealing (she can afford to buy the store’s entire stock a few times over), but rather because it will get her father’s attention. Falling asleep in the dressing room wasn’t part of the plan.

“Career Opportunities” came during the post-“Home Alone” portion of John Hughes’ screenwriting career. It carries with it the same theme that most of his earlier movies used: Adults are stupid, while the young find common ground and enlightenment through open and honest dialogue. Like Samantha in “Sixteen Candles,” Jim gains the attention of the town’s most popular member of the opposite sex. Like the high school students serving detention in “The Breakfast Club,” Jim and Josie would never have interacted if not for one chance encounter. One difference between the two films is that “The Breakfast Club” did not require a manufactured conflict to keep the plot rolling. The appearance of the two crooks (real-life brothers Dermot and Kieran Mulroney) feels like unused ideas from “Home Alone,” minus the cartoonish booby traps. By the time the hoodlums arrive, Jim and Josie have done all of the bonding they’re going to do in a PG-13 rated comedy set mostly inside a retail store, and so this ‘conflict’ only exists to bring the movie to a conclusion.

Frank Whaley is no Matthew Broderick, but the lazy, live-at-home Jim Dodge is more relatable than Ferris Bueller’s spoiled rich kid out for a joyride.  He may be the lead, but he’s not the main draw. Anyone with any sense is watching this movie for Jennifer Connelly. Like a certain current 20-something actress named Jennifer, Connelly is naturally talented, beautiful and wise beyond her years. She makes you instantly interested in Josie’s personal dilemma, and she hopelessly outclasses her co-star while she’s on screen… and she looks good in a white tank top.

The movie itself is somewhat inferior when held up against the classic comedies which John Hughes brought us in the 1980’s. After a certain point… I think it was the success of “Home Alone” that did it… he never was quite able to match the success of his teen comedies and of those featuring John Candy (who also has an uncredited cameo appearance here). I’m left not all-together aware what the point of “Career Opportunities” was meant to be. Not all comedy is meant to have a point or teach a moral lesson, but Hughes’ own scripts usually did. Whether it was that everyone has similar worries and doubts, that you shouldn’t let your life pass you by, or that nothing can take the place of family, there were always words of wisdom at the end. The main characters often did something either destructive or illegal (or both) while never facing punishment, because it was all for a good cause. That happens here, too, but what are we to have learned? I suppose it could be to do what makes you happy, not just in work but in life. I’m just not sure. Maybe I’m just too hopelessly distracted by the eye candy to notice.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Maria de Medeiros, Ving Rhames, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Whaley

Were I to pick one director with whom I most desire to have a sit-down discussion accompanied by a few drinks, it would be Quentin Tarantino. In his interviews, he leaves me with the impression that he and I share more than a few of the same interests in the world of cinema as well as music. Tell me you can listen to “Jungle Boogie” and not want to get up out of your chair and dance badly. It doesn’t hurt that Tarantino and I also share the same birthplace of Knoxville, Tennessee. I freely admit to giggling the first time I heard Bruce Willis mention my hometown in this movie.

I would love to tell Tarantino in person how I feel about each one of his movie scripts, but I would undoubtedly spend the most time on the subject of “Pulp Fiction.” Its narrative format having been inspired by the 1963 Mario Bava-directed horror anthology film “Black Sabbath,” “Pulp Fiction” is a three-movement symphony, of which the instruments are violence and witty dialogue. Not a single character in the movie can be categorized as a “good” person, and yet the story provides for us ways in which to both sympathize and root for them all to succeed at what they’re doing.

One of my favorite things Tarantino does with this movie comes during the segment featuring the boxer named Butch, played by Bruce Willis. He’s in the process of making his getaway after winning a match in which he was supposed to take a dive. While driving back to the motel room where his girlfriend is waiting for him, he comes to a stop sign. Right there in front of him crossing the street is the crime boss he cheated out of thousands of dollars. It’s right out of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and it’s just perfectly played.

I don’t know if I can come up with another actor in the last twenty years whose film career experienced a resurrection quite like John Travolta’s did thanks to “Pulp Fiction.”  Introduced to the world by the TV show “Welcome Back, Kotter” and the films “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever,” his best pre-“Pulp Fiction” movie is easily Brian De Palma’s 1981 conspiracy thriller “Blow Out.” The early 1990’s, however, saw Travolta starring as the father of a talking baby in “Look Who’s Talking” and its sequels. Thank goodness for Tarantino! As the accident-prone hitman Vincent Vega, whether he’s the focus or not, Travolta has a key part to play in each of the movie’s three segments, each involving messes that Vincent creates which someone else will have to help to clean up. You get the sense that Vincent might shoot his own foot off if someone weren’t around to hold him by the hand.

John Travolta gets many of the film’s best lines, but the majority of those that aren’t spoken by him are given to Samuel L. Jackson as Jules, Vincent’s partner in the hit assignments. Jackson plays Jules as a man who can walk into any room and take control of a given situation, even when the odds seem against him. He’s as much of a smooth talker as he is a stone cold killer. But Jules is not a stoic individual. When someone annoys him, Jules will let them know it immediately, and not always with his words. But a near-death experience which Jules equates to an act of God causes him to question whether he still wants to be in his current line of work. Probably the smartest decision he’s come to in his life. Samuel L. Jackson is so reliably good at his craft, is it any wonder how he got more work in the 1990’s than any other actor?

Although Vincent and Jules are clearly my favorite characters, and although there are several noteworthy performances throughout including that of Uma Thurman (whose image dominates the promotional material for “Pulp Fiction”), my favorite piece of acting comes in the flashback that leads into the “Gold Watch” segment. No, I’m not talking about Christopher Walken, although he is terrific. The guy is so good that he can star as the villain in the worst James Bond movie of all-time (1985’s “A View to a Kill”) and still be the best part of it. No, I’m referring to the child actor playing the young Butch. This kid deserved an award of some kind. How do you listen to the speech that Walken gives in this scene and manage to keep a straight face? Granted, the way the scene is set up, it’s possible they might’ve filmed their parts separately and would thus never have been on set at the same time, but I’d like to think this kid sat attentively without so much as breaking a smile while the great Christopher Walken talked of hiding a watch in the one place no one would ever think to search for it.

I close on this final thought: If there does not exist somewhere in this world a Jack Rabbit Slim’s restaurant, there should. If it does exist, then it’s on my bucket list of things to do before I die to locate this place and eat there.