NO TELL MOTEL (2012)

Studio:       Uncork'd Entertainment
Director:    Brett Donowho
Writer:       T.J. Cimfel
Producer:  Rick Dugdale
Stars:     Chalie Howes, Johnny Hawkes, Angel McCord, Rileigh Chalmers, Andrew MacFarlane, Chelsey Reist

Review Score:

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Summary:

Five friends are stranded at an abandoned motel that is haunted by a family who suffered a tragedy there in the 1970’s.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

The Round the Bend Motel is run by a husband and wife who reside there with their daughter. One afternoon in the 1970’s, the young daughter interrupts her playing with a wind-up toy to chase a bunny rabbit. While her mother reads a book, the little girl runs into the street and is killed by a passing truck.

In the present day, five friends travel together in an RV: Spencer and his girlfriend Rachel, Spencer’s brother Kyle and his girlfriend Megan, and their friend Corey. Making a gas station pit stop, we learn that Megan is pregnant and Kyle is a pill-popper.

An unexpected road closure forces a detour, but drug-addled Kyle drives recklessly and overturns the RV. Kyle hides a gun in his pocket and the group retreats to an abandoned motel nearby.

They begin exploring the motel. Kyle pops more pills. Megan reveals her pregnancy to Rachel and Rachel confides that she committed a hit-and-run as a teenager. Shortly thereafter, Rachel sees a little girl jump from a swing and follows her into the street. Rachel discovers that the little girl is a bloody ghost just as a truck hits Rachel. None of her friends cry or scream when they discover that she is dead. They drag the unconscious driver of the truck into the motel.

Corey searches the office for a first aid kit. Inside the kit she finds the little girl’s wind-up toy and also sees the girl running through the room just before the floor collapses. An argument ends with Kyle slapping Megan. He goes to the office and sees Corey trapped in the rubble on the floor below. However, he is distracted by the sight of needles and morphine and decides to shoot up instead of rescuing her.

Corey wanders the basement and finds a mirror with the word “goodbye” written in its dust before witnessing a flashback scene before her eyes. In it, she sees the mother who once lived there slitting her wrists in a bathtub. Upstairs in a morphine haze, Kyle has a vision of the father finding paper in a typewriter with the word “goodbye” typed on it.

Seemingly unaffected by his girlfriend’s death, Spencer tries to kiss Megan. Corey tries to crawl out of the hole in the floor but falls back down and dies when she sees the little girl again. Kyle tells his brother what he saw after almost hastily shooting him with the gun in his pocket. They find a root cellar entrance to the lower level, but Spencer becomes mysteriously locked in a room. Kyle is again distracted by more morphine vials as well as new visions of the past.

Matthew, the driver of the truck that killed Rachel, wakes and tells Megan the motel's story. Grigor Horak was a Polish immigrant who ran the hotel with his wife Mary. Their daughter who died in the prologue was named Angela. After Angela’s death, Mary tried to commit suicide, but Grigor rescued her from the bathtub. At this point in the story, Matthew passes out.

Kyle forgets about Spencer and returns to the upstairs bathroom to shoot more morphine. He also sees Angela appear in the bathtub. The door trapping Spencer opens and he witnesses a vision of Grigor raping his drugged wife. After her suicide attempt, Grigor kept her tied to a table in the basement. His plan was to impregnate her with another child so that they could be a family again. Spencer finds Megan and they go back downstairs to search for Corey. They find Angela’s wind-up toy as well as Corey’s dead body. The scars on her arms indicate that Corey was a cutter who had attempted suicide herself.

Matthew recovers and follows a vision of Angela. Megan and Spencer find Kyle dead of an overdose. Spencer reveals that he drugged Megan at a Halloween party and had sex with her. She then realizes that Spencer is the father of her unborn child. Disgusted with this rape revelation, Megan goes off alone and encounters Angela. She asks the apparition why she is tormenting them and Angela levitates.

Spencer finds a prescription pill bottle with the name Matthew Horak on it just as Matthew enters and knocks him out. Angela leads Megan to the basement table where she witnesses a scene of Mary giving birth. After the child is delivered, Mary strangles Grigor to death with her restraints, leaving her and the baby to die trapped in the basement.

Matthew finds Megan. Somehow he knows that she is pregnant. At first she cannot escape, but she is able to knock Matthew down and she uses a ladder to climb out of the hole in the floor. Megan tries escaping in Matthew’s truck when she finds the road closure signs in his truck bed. Matthew then knocks her out.

Megan regains consciousness to find herself tied to the basement table. She has a vision that Mary died of blood loss, but Angela’s ghost rescued the baby, who grew up and became Matthew. Matthew admits that he killed Rachel on purpose and says that Megan is to be Angela’s new mother.

Spencer returns and confronts Matthew about the anti-psychotic pills he found. They fight until Spencer is subdued and Matthew turns his attention to Megan. Megan has a miscarriage and stabs Matthew. She then ties Spencer to the table and leaves him in the basement with Angela. Outside, Megan steps into the street and allows herself to be hit by a vehicle.

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Review:

“No Tell Motel” unintentionally does something I may not have seen before in a film.  When the first victim from a group of five twenty-somethings is found dead, not a single one of her friends has any sort of meaningful emotional response at all.  One girl mutters “oh my God” while another wears a concerned expression with what looks like welling tears.  But no one cries, screams, or otherwise noticeably reacts.  In fact, not long after, the victim’s boyfriend shares a laugh with his brother’s girlfriend before trying to kiss her.  Maybe all of this could be chalked up to shock.  Except that two of them had the wherewithal to pull the man who ran over their friend out of his car, carry him back to the motel, and begin the search for a first aid kit.

And that is a prime illustration of how wooden the characters are in this story.  Each of the five friends caught in this haunted motel has a personal secret that, through unbelievable coincidence, is connected to the story of the family whose little girl died there.  Remove the individual skeleton in each closet, however, and the five of them are nearly interchangeable.  Audiences may be tired with the usual grouping of high school or college friends in these scenarios: the jock, the nerd, the slut, the virgin, etc.  But the uninteresting alternatives on display here make those familiar stereotypes seem far more desirable.  Or at least more entertaining.

Flat personalities apparently come with an insatiable desire to wander throughout the motel on a whim.  Characters come and go, enter new rooms, forget who they were looking for and go somewhere else, and generally move around often without any motivation.  They wander so far away from each other that when an entire floor caves in beneath one girl’s feet, not one person is close enough to hear it happen.  Either that or this is the largest, most sprawling roadside motel ever built.

The story behind the haunting has compelling aspects, but it is presented in ways that do it a disservice.  For one, the little blonde girl at the center of the mystery is too cute.  White makeup and darkened eye sockets give her a deathly appearance when she would have been better served conveying a feeling of menace.

Flashback scenes gradually tell the story behind the motel’s haunting.  Yet the director chose to have the characters witness these flashbacks as though they were happening directly in front of them.  There is no fog filter, change in color tone, or other effect to give the impression of ghosts replaying a scene.  It is strange to have the friends witness each event as if the people from the past are right there in the same room.  This is a missed opportunity to convey an otherworldly feel.  And like their first friend’s death, they strangely have little reaction to the fact that seemingly real people just appeared and disappeared after playing out a memory only a few feet away.

This is how the movie misses its mark in instilling any sense of eeriness.  Questionable choices in how to present the scenes and move the characters from one situation to the next only draw attention to weaknesses in the script and production design.

“No Tell Motel” fails to stand out in either horror sub-genre of creepy ghost children or creepy motels.  The film may be technically competent in places, but the uninteresting characters with their absurdly convenient dark secrets and the puzzling presentation make the movie uninspired and forgettable.

Review Score:  20

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