The Innkeepers Movie Review
The Innkeepers - Movie Review
Director/Writer: Ti West
Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, and Kelly McGillis
DVD - release April 24, 2012
Genre: Horror Movie
It’s shaping up to be the quietest weekend on record at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, and no wonder - it’s the last few days before the historic hotel closes its doors for good. With the owner out of town, it’s also the perfect time for the Pedlar’s sole remaining employees, Claire - young and dorky - and Luke - thirty-something and dorky - to put their amateur ghost hunting skills to the test. Yep, in case you hadn’t guessed, the Yankee Pedlar is haunted. Very haunted. With only a handful of guests to keep an eye on, Claire and Luke hope to make contact with the spirit of Madeleine O’Malley, a turn of the century suicide who is still (somewhat inexplicably) pissed off that her body was held in the inn’s basement for three days. Madeleine, it turns out, is ready to make contact too.
As Claire, The Innkeepers anti-heroine with an inhaler, Sara Paxton is all dejection and big blue eyes. She and Luke - who spends most of his work time building his ghost-hunting website - are feeling the reassures of being soon-to-be-unemployed underachievers (between them they can’t even manage to keep towels in the hotels only two occupied rooms). Much of the film’s charm comes from their goofball rapport and from small but telling details, like Luke’s duct-tape covered ghost hunting headphones and Claire’s chipped nail polish.
Kelly McGillis, continuing her foray into the macabre (she appeared in 2010’s very fun post-apocalyptic vampire film Stake Land) checks in to The Innkeepers as a sitcom star turned psychic. She is conveniently able to give Claire insight into what the Yankee Pedlar’s spirits (turns out there are more than one) are up to, and it’s not good.
The Innkeepers was filmed at an operating Connecticut inn (you guessed it, also called the Yankee Pedlar), and the inn itself should have been one of the main characters of the film, just as the fictional Overlook Hotel held its own in The Shining. Director Ti West misses the opportunity, however, and the Pedlar never really fulfills its potential in conveying the sense of eerie desolation of an almost empty, lost-in-time hotel.
starts out low key and even funny, and features several somehow not annoying gotcha-type scares. But as the real scares begin to hit, the tone becomes grimmer. Despite the ghastliness, the film never ventures into the realms of slasher-dom, but maintains an old-school horror movie feel.
Viewers may find the abrupt change of tone halfway through The Innkeepers distractingly jarring, and not all viewers will be happy with the way the film ends. But then again, do we really want a horror movie to leave us content and ready for pleasant dreams?
Review By Susan Fair
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