Coroner’s Report: Vacancy 2

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on January 15, 2009

Coming your way on January 20th is the direct to video sequel to the 2007 thriller Vacancy, cleverly titled Vacancy 2: The First Cut. While Sheryl Crow and Rod Stewart may proclaim the first cut to be the deepest, that’s only true if you count The First Cut as the second cut, as its inferior to the previous installment. Follow? Good.

The movie finds Caleb and his fiance Jessica, along with their grumbly friend Tanner, as they’re heading cross country in a move to North Carolina, where Jessica and Caleb are going to live. To avoid arriving at 3am and waking her parents, whom they’ll be staying with, they decide to pull off at the Meadow View Inn for a few hours sleep. It doesn’t help that the proprietors of the Inn, former voyeur smut peddlers, have teamed up with a serial killer to produce and sell snuff films.

Kills

Seven souls are sent skyward in this slasher – if you don’t love alliteration you can leave right now. The body count is decent, but the kills come in clumps, leaving much of the film to rely on tension rather than brutality, a feat it doesn’t quite excel at.

Ills

The First Cut made me think of videos, as in editing them, but with the amount of stab wounds in this film, I’m betting they were clever enough to realize that the knife cuts both ways on that pun. We get a plethora of stabbings, a few gunshots, a lot of shotgun butts to the head, a burning, and a couple of nails through the head. Most of the kills are brutal, but mostly bloodless in the way they’re shot. My gorehound self wasn’t satisfied, but two of the kills are pretty effective.

Lust

There is a prostitute with a nice butt and some people make out, but there is little here for your inner pervert.

Learning

Don’t trust sketchy looking motels. Seriously, go for the well lit ones with cars in the parking lot. Also, since the Bill of Rights (And Supreme Court) have affirmed the natural right of citizens to bear arms, consider owning a gun. How many horror or thriller films would be over immediately if the victim had a gun? Pretty much all of ‘em.

Review

It doesn’t take long for a group of smut peddlers to make the strange and fast decision to get into the murder business. It’s almost comical how quickly that all gets put together. Throughout the film, I was expecting some solid connection to Vacancy, but it just wasn’t there. The motels are different (Pinewood vs Meadow View Inn) and none of the characters show up latter. We couldn’t even get a cameo from Frank Whaley. I thought the first movie was very Hitchcockian and a pretty tense thriller, where as this sequel was, for the most part, by the numbers with little to offer.

That being said, it does maintain tension at times, though you rarely care about the characters involved. Vacancy 2 is simple story telling adequately told, it is by no means a winner, nor is it a loser. If you have an interest in the film or want to try scaring yourself out of staying at a motel, this is an alright way of passing about 90 minutes. There is an impressive burn in the film – that’s stuntguy talk for someone being lit on fire and walking around. This guy either really went the distance or they did several burns. Either way, the scene is impressive.

In the end, The First Cut is completely average on almost all accounts. It decently manages tension throughout, provides some decent kills, but the pacing falters and the film doesn’t have the balls to be a proper and bleak prequel like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Use it to pass the time on a dark night or as a date movie with someone who’s a horror lightweight, but don’t expect much and the film will do just fine.

Read more articles by Robert Fure