As the season draws closer---and by "the season", of course, i mean the super-creepy onset of Halloween---my girlfriend and I continue to spend our nights binging on horror movies in the living room, the lights down, the street lamp outside flickering away. Last night, we were even afforded our own personal dark and stormy night with which to enjoy these little genre nuggets. Sadly, we squandered the first 90 minutes of our double feature on PRIMEVAL, but spent the wee hours of the night squirming at Nimrod Antal's tense little English-language debut, VACANCY.

Lean and economic, VACANCY features a classic horror-movie setup---it literally opens on a winding road, off the beaten path, in the middle of the night---and plops our protagonists, Dave (Luke Wilson) and Amy (Kate Beckinsdale) in room 4 of a dingy late-night motel, replete with cockroaches, rusty water, flickering signs, and a twitchy, Bates-esque manager-slash-desk clerk (Frank Whaley, excellent). Smartly, Antal and writer Mark L. Smith avoid the frills of the in-vogue torture-porn set, choosing instead to employ a particularly triangular story arc---there's a setup, and a reveal, and we're done, essentially. Despite the a-list stars, we're wisely left unsure of the protagonists' fates---are we looking at the couple that gets away, or simply a particularly pretty set of victim fodder?---and are therefore invested.

Dave and Amy are troubled, as couples in these types of films usually are---because, what better than imminent peril to bring your romantic squabbles into perspective?---by a particularly harsh familial tragedy (revealed in, i must admit, a better-than-average bit of exposition), and are discussing their impending divorce when David starts watching a stack of home videos provided by the hotel. Instead of the porn that we'd all hope for, though, it's a series of brutal snuff films, set in the very room that they're in. Dave realizes that their room is wired for picture and sound, there's an "oh, shiit" moment, and the banging on the walls commences.

Anyone who saw Bryan Bertino's THE STRANGERS this year will recognize the similarities: masked phantasms, troubled couples, banging on walls, devastatingly quick cut-and-run duration. VACANCY isn't quite as grisly---in fact, it functions almost more like a thriller than anything, as it's largely devoid of gore. A few more blood sprays and VACANCY could have been an excellent exercise in nostalgia---as it stands, it does really well ratcheting up the suspense, and providing us with a few genuine creep-out scares (hulking masked figures materializing at windows=great) before going on it's way.

The core trio of actors acquit themselves admirably, too. Luke Wilson, once again vacillating between silly and serious, inhabits his part nicely, and Kate Beckinsdale actually manages a pretty nice little character arc, given the 80 minutes and circumstances she's given to work with. Frank Whaley's Mason, meanwhile, is pretty much just a garden-variety creep, but the scenery-nibbling Whaley does so well by him that he's actually kinda joyous to watch.

If VACANCY has a flaw, it's that it ends rather abruptly and inconsequentially (girlfriend quote: "did they get bored and just give up?"); a true b-horror classic would have at least tried to turn the tables a little bit. But in a movie that has circumvented our expectations by delivering us a pair of victims with brains, who actually think things through, devise schemes, and learn from mistakes, it seems like kind of a regression to end in such a pat way. There's no outsmarting, no subverting of the plan. It's kind of a letdown after what's preceded it.

Still, though, VACANCY is such a tight little movie that I can't help but to recommend it. And in the narrow subgenre of motel/hotel/holiday inn horror flicks, VACANCY is a welcome addition to the pantheon.

AND there's a crawl through a tunnel of icky rats. Count that one in the "pro" column for me.