DO NOT DISTURB (2013)

Studio:       Image Entertainment
Director:    BC Furtney
Writer:       BC Furtney
Producer:  BC Furtney, JB Destiny
Stars:     Stephen Geoffreys, Tiffany Shepis, Ezra Buzzington, Corey Haim

Review Score: 

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Summary:

A once successful screenwriter fallen on hard times resorts to extreme measures for his latest work of inspiration. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Renting a seedy hotel room by the week on Skid Row, fallen screenwriter Don Malek entertains Starlite Studios head Stanley Glissberg as his guest. Don gives Stanley tainted cocaine that renders the man semi-conscious. Don mentions a woman named Katherin before dragging Stanley’s body into the bathroom.

Don’s agent Ava Collins comes to his hotel room demanding to see a new script. Don shows her Stanley in his bathtub as well as an appendix that Don says he removed from the man. Ava assumes that the two men are staging some kind of gag. After she leaves, Don prepares to perform another surgery on Stanley. Don later ignores a loudmouth British rocker named Jasper Crash at the local bar.

Ava returns the following evening. Stanley stumbles into the room in a daze and Ava realizes that Don is torturing the man. Ava leaves with Don’s secret. Don trades beer to his next-door neighbor Spitz for use of the crippled man’s wheelchair. Wearing a mask and a wig, Don wheels Stanley out of the hotel.

Spitz is blacked out when Don returns the wheelchair. Don finds photos in Spitz’s lap of captive women. Ava visits Don to relay the story that Stanley was found at a bus terminal unable to speak or to move. She still pressures Don to turn in a script.

Bleeding from a large wound in his chest, Spitz wheels over to Don’s room to cash in a favor. Spitz demands that Don kill a hooker in Spitz’s room. Instead, Don pays the hooker and allows her to leave. While cleaning up Spitz’s room, Don discovers a box of videotapes showing Spitz abusing prostitutes. Donning his mask and wig, Don drugs and kills Spitz. He then burns the videotapes in a barrel fire outside.

Ava has lunch with rival agent Carter Ball and learns that he is poaching one of her clients. Ava asks Don to kill Carter, but he plays coy. Don has another encounter with Jasper Crash at the bar and kills the annoying man.

Ava has an escort named Rebecca drop clues to Carter about where he can find Don. Don returns to the hotel and sees the police investigating Spitz’s room after the body parts were discovered in a dumpster. A man named DiAngelo tells the cops that Don probably killed Spitz. Detective Dom Turkovich becomes suspicious after asking Don several questions.

Carter comes to hotel attempting to poach Don. It is revealed that Don was once engaged to an aspiring actress named Katherin Dunlap, but she died following an audition at Stanley Glissberg’s home. Stanley was acquitted of murder. Don asks Carter to return the next day.

Don has sex with Rebecca. Ava visits again, hoping that Don killed Carter. She admits that she wants Carter dead and that she knows about the death of Don’s fiancée. They make plans to meet again.

Detective Turkovich reviews surveillance footage and realizes that Don was involved in what happened to Stanley. Turkovich confronts Don at the hotel and Don kills him. Don then takes a gun and kills himself in his bathroom.

Ava returns and finds Don’s body. Carter then arrives and Ava kills him with Don’s syringes.

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Review:

If “Do Not Disturb” were a partygoer attempting to engage another guest around the punchbowl, it would be a conversation one could not get out of fast enough.  “Do Not Disturb” is that insufferable variety of personality completely oblivious about just how much of a crushing bore it really is.  Deluded by self-importance, it drones on incessantly while overwhelming social graces demand waiting for a graceful exit before politely bowing out.  In this case, that moment only comes when the end credits hit the screen, by which time it is already too late to salvage the evening.

Desperate for someone to notice it standing alone in the corner, “Do Not Disturb” even name-drops an English accented Corey Haim in a silly role as a poor man’s Johnny Rotten.  In an insult to the other actors with much bigger bites of screentime, Haim is credited as a top billed draw even though he appears for two minutes in a puffed up cameo that could be removed entirely without making a difference.

Seldom seen Stephen Geoffreys plays Don Malek, a Hollywood screenwriter whose white-hot status now runs ice cold.  Don’s agent Ava Collins clamps down like a vice trying to squeeze a new script out of her client.  What Ava soon discovers, however, is that Don has traded his pen for a scalpel, and a loose screw has necessitated a career change to murderer.  But maybe that is something she can use to her advantage in the dog eat dog world of Hollyweird.

Despite that description, “Do Not Disturb” is not a biting satire about the film industry’s slimy underbelly.  Nor is it a captivating horror movie, thriller, or mystery.  “Do Not Disturb” feels more like the screen version of a stage play.  But not a play of the Tennessee Williams or David Mamet variety.  This is the type of greenhorn production that takes place in a Los Feliz loft, where the fifteen seat room is populated solely by family and friends not smart enough to craft a good excuse about why they had anywhere else to be.

The stiff staging combined with the confining location of a seedy hotel room and hallway where the majority of scenes take place creates a cramped sense of dull malaise.  Since the camera has nowhere to move without bumping into a wall, most character exchanges are edited between static close-ups of talking heads.  Director BC Furtney is missing the rhythm for how to make the moments flow.  Shots linger too long and the little gaps between lines make the overlong dialogue all the more excruciating to sit through.

Trapped in this barren hotel room, there is little to look at, and the camera intentionally keeps it that way.  When Don turns to homicide, the fatal blows from his hands land just offscreen and out of frame.  His ghoulish crimes fail to resonate with the lens always tilted or panned away from the horror.  The one time that an open wound does appear onscreen, it looks like a prosthetic scar cut from a Ziploc bag and slathered to the actor’s chest with Dollar Store vampire blood.  Accenting the coma-inducing onscreen activities is a noisily annoying score that sounds like someone gargling a throat full of houseflies.

Confusing itself as a character study, “Do Not Disturb” focuses all of its efforts on a wordy script of monologues, duologues, and blah blah blah that may as well be delivered by Charlie Brown’s teacher considering what little attention it grabs.  And for all of the talking that it does, the story has nothing meaningful to say.

Thirty seconds of amateur sleuthing on IMDB reveals that “Do Not Disturb” is actually a 2010 movie titled “New Terminal Hotel” that is being rereleased in 2013 under a new identity.  But you know what they say about a rose by any other name.  This is a film that needed more than a title transplant if it intended anyone to sit up and take notice.  “Do Not Disturb” is destined to be as justifiably overlooked and completely forgotten in 2013 as it was in 2010.

Review Score:  20

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