The Innkeepers

I fucking hate movies like this.  Seriously, I do.  I'd rather pull all my hair out than even bother trying to write a review for this, because the people who love the movie will blather on about how I just didn't "get it" and the people who hate the movie will think I wasn't being harsh enough because I don't have the balls to say what I think (never mind that this IS what I think, dickface, or why else would I bother saying it in a review?)  Can you tell I'm in a bad mood right now?  I was excited to see this movie.  Despite being warned by friends who believed the hype and then got annoyed with the resulting film, I was worked up to see it today, and for a lot of the running time, I thought I had a winner on my hands.  Yeah, there are annoying flaws plastered throughout the first hour and a half, but I was able to let them slide because I liked the characters and thought maybe there'd wind up being enough that I liked to counteract whatever I didn't like.  Then the ending came, huge bullshit cop-out that it is, and it pissed me off so much that it put every flaw I'd been pushing under the rug in glaring technicolor spotlight and made me hate them even more.

The movie is about two minimum wage employees at an inn which will be closing its doors after this last weekend.  The inn was once a grand, elegant place, we can tell, but business has died off and the owner is incommunicado on vacation, so the two ditzy young employees are all that's left of the staff.  The rooms on the third floor have already been closed off and stripped, and soon that will happen to the rest of the place.  For this last weekend, the two employees are planning to investigate the rumors that the inn is haunted.  They split up the front desk shifts and just sleep at the inn during their off time, and they wander around recording EVP (electronic voice phenomena, where ghosts communicate in a room at a level we can't hear with our ears, so there's a special machine to record it).  So these two nitwits investigate, in between being shitty hosts to the few guests at the inn, when the supernatural happenings increase in their fervor.  What's going on at the inn?  Are the ghosts really haunting the place?  If the ghosts are real, what do they want?  Most importantly, by the time we find the answers to these questions, are we going to care?

The answer, for me, was a resounding no.  I seriously pegged the male innkeeper/desk worker/dipshit and figured out what his plot twist was in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and same with the female worker, because the script makes it so glaringly obvious to me that I couldn't help but figure it out.  Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but I knew what was going to happen with these two, yet I still enjoyed myself because the story was kind of fun to watch and the acting wasn't bad.  I tried to ignore my inner rage at the "quirky" music and the "comedic" elements that had me rolling my eyes, and I hoped I''d be wrong about the plot twists or at least that there'd be something coming that I didn't see, but as the story unfolded, I figured everything out as soon as it was foreshadowed in the script, so I got kind of bored.

The supernatural happenings held my interest, because honestly ghosts just freak me out, but as the film drew closer and closer to its inevitable conclusion I got more and more annoyed, and by the end I was snapping obscenities at the screen.  Ti West, you're not as clever as you think you are.  I can't say that I didn't enjoy this at all, because the performances and the supernatural aspects did distract me from the rest of this sinking ship, but by the time the movie draws to its inevitable conclusion, I just didn't care anymore.  I feel like I wasted my time with this one, and there was enough talent there that the movie could have been way better than it was, and that's the most annoying this about it for me.  If you're going to suck, do so from the beginning, don't give me enough good stuff to string me along so when you pull the rug out from under me, I fall on my ass cursing the day I ever decided to give your movie a chance in the first place.