Toner_Low

VACANCY (3/5 stars)



From THE DICTIONARY OF DOCTOR LAO:
"Redneck (n): An individual who chooses a path of willful ignorance and uses this prejudice to fuel hostile and disruptive behavior to interrupt the lives of others. Rednecks are not restricted to any region of the planet, and they can flourish in both rural and urban settings."

The ritual of redneckaphobia begins, again.

There have been so many films in this genre that it’s tough to judge this one on its own merits. While watching horror is a ritual, no one ever complained about an original ritual, which this isn’t. (But that’s not a complaint.) Occultists warn about using the same ritual music too much. No matter how good it is, if you use it too much, it loses its evocative power. That may have been a problem faced by STRANGER THAN FICTION and, I think, this is a problem here. VACANCY’s merits may simply be lost in the over-familiarity we’ve gained with the genre. I can’t even recall all of the films that share this genre, but a few are:

HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES
THE HILLS HAVE EYES
TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE
WRONG TURN
SPIDER BABY
HOUSE OF WAX (2005)
PSYCHO

The formula is:
1. City people go to rural areas where they don’t belong.
2. Vehicular trouble, often manufactured by the evildoers, screws up the heroes.
3. Someone who appears friendly leads the heroes into a trap.
4. The heroes are terrorized by rural sadists.
5. The obvious, male hero becomes killed/disabled.
6. The heroine must take it upon herself to escape, often killing the sadists in a grand manner.

These movies all seem to be about our fear of rednecks. That may not be PC to say, but it’s true.

In the cinematic world, rednecks are primal, temper-driven figures who shun using objectivity and logic in their decision-making. They’re quick to anger, superstitious, mix their sexuality with equal parts repression and hostility, and see the initiation of force as an acceptable method of resolving problems. What’s not to fear?



Now, Hollywood could be accused of perpetuating unfair stereotypes. But are they? And if this were simply a matter of smug, liberal filmmakers making fun of “real America,” then these films would not be so successful in “real America.” Maybe these movies are just entertainment, thus explaining their box office.

But maybe these films strike a chord of emotional truth with viewers… at least they represent a concern of viewers, grounded in reality or not. The fact that they often appeal to rednecks can be seen as a function of one of several things…

a) No matter how redneck you are, there will always be someone more redneck than you. This is a very credible theory.
b) Rednecks like to decadently revel in their bad qualities, and take a strange, unconscious, vicarious delight in doing so by seeing them there atheistic city folks get punished real good.
c) Rednecks are too stupid to know that these movies are about how frightening they are to the rest of society.

So, I guess as an open note to rednecks: knock it off. Oh, and by the way, the earth is round.

And it’s not like rednecks are unfairly singled out and picked-on in horror movies. Hello? Mad scientists? There seems to be a bell curve in horror movies regarding the relationship between intelligence and evil, reassuring people to be average. Too dumb? Lunatic killers! Too smart? You’ll be a mad scientist… or, while hoping to help people, you’ll be a good scientist who creates a bad computer, robot, or virus.

About the movie –

The Human Cannonball remarked that it was (for once) about intelligent people who are put in this situation, and that was refreshing. Not just intelligent people, but intelligent people who were not teenagers. This gives the film a real lift above its sub-genre. Add to this a distinct lack of gore, and you wind up with a film that is actually scary for the right reasons. You’re not being manipulated by a moviemaker looking to make you jump at EVERYthing. The movie is about grownups, and you get treated as one.

Of course, the great granddaddy of all of these films is PSYCHO, and VACANCY acknowledges this is a celebratory way. The opening titles are what Saul Bass would have done, were he alive today. (Hell, let’s note that the film has opening titles. We see these less and less, and I miss them.) The music seems to be a riff on the urgent strings Bernard Herrman used to introduce PSYCHO. The movie takes place in California, near Bates Motel country. And the lobby of the motel has lots of statues of birds, which can only be a nod to Hitchcock.

Of course, the logic police can have a field day with this, and it I think it probably should have taken place in the late 1970’s.

The highest praise I can give the movie is that I left it with a nice sense of paranoia about most of the people I saw outside.

The mission of Art has been accomplished, again!