Vacancy: Critic Reviews

Vacancy is a schlock surprise: a no-frills motel-hell slasher film -- with a bit of soul.

This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.

well, however much I wanted to love it, the same old sorts of things happen, and the rigorous plausibility and consistency on which everything depends are thrown away.

It's welcome to see another movie that relies more on apprehension and suspense than torture chambers. Vacancy might not get Mr. Hitchcock smiling from above. But he won't be spinning in his grave, either.

[Director] Antal's slickly edited, fast-moving style is the best thing about this otherwise-cliched movie.

There's no agenda in Vacancy other than to keep you in a state of nervous collapse for 85 minutes, but [director] Antal fulfills it honorably for the most part.

[Director] Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore.

Short, sharp and to the point, Vacancy has a single goal, and that is to scare the hell out of you. It's not as gleefully sadistic as, say, Hostel, but it will give you one very rough night's sleep. Naturally, I mean that as a compliment.

A quick and dirty job, a mean little movie ripping off the atmosphere and decorations of Psycho and a half-dozen other horror-thriller classics.

If Psycho and Peeping Tom are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you. This it does uncommonly well.

You start to think you're going to get a first-rate psychological thriller and instead you get third-rate schlock, with some legitimate scary moments but no insight into the motivation behind [Frank Whaley's character's] psychosis.

The kind of sleazily effective horror/genre movie Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were trying for in Grindhouse. Vacancy catches you by the throat and puts you through the wringer.

80 minutes of formulaic unpleasantness isn't even close to my idea of a good time, and I doubt that Hitchcock himself could have done very much with Mark L. Smith's script.

Vacancy, in the end, simply offers a particularly aggressive brand of couples counseling.

Director Nimrod Antal works with razor-sharp skill, amping up the horror with suggestion and anticipation rather than flashy embellishments.

Passable spook-show nightmare scary fare.

A riveting little shocker in which a viewer buys into the entire grisly premise.

Seldom has criminal violence been so unabashedly used for entertainment, in a story in which the criminals are perpetrating violence to be sold as entertainment.

Packs a lot of old-fashioned shocks into its taut 80-minute running time.

Strictly by-the-numbers horror.

The point of Vacancy is the terror, not the torture. Horror is vastly more effective when left to the mind's eye and it is what we can't see in Vacancy that truly frightens.

A near-toxic mismatch of script, cast and director.

A nicely compact, tense thriller that loses a little of its punch as a result of a rushed, generic ending.

Feels tired, derivative and lackluster.

The way in which it gets off on the violence -- and, ostensibly, hopes the audience does the same -- is especially distasteful and, frankly, misogynistic.