Vacancy at the No Tell Motel

Vacancy at the No Tell Motel

Everybody’s got a secret.

No Tell Motel (2012) is a glorious little B movie gem with little to no redeeming qualities, and only a tiny dose of undiscovered potential. A fragment, even.

Director Brett Donawho’s secret? He must be afraid of the dark, because the only scare he seems to offer are dark rooms full of dust.

No Tell Motel, filmed ‘in’ Vernon, BC (though, clearly outside, maybe near Barriere? I recognized the dry hills full of charred trees in the opening scene), begins with a grainy, sepia toned scene depicting a sad little blonde girl on a swing, ma and pa lounge about in front of their motel, the Round the Bend Motel, ignoring their little lady, who promptly follows a bunny into the road and SPLAT.  Mom and Pop fall to their knees, weeping in over acted agony.

Cut to the future, a group of edgy teens are heading out to ‘rough it’ in the backcountry. Kyle, played by someone who’s name I’ve forgotten and will probably never need to remember again, reveals to the audience at a gas station that he’s a pill popping junkie, as he scoops mushy spilled pills from the toilet. His girlfriend, Maggie/Megan, buys a pregnancy test. Everyone’s got a secret.

Kyle, in his pill fueled rage manages to flip the vehicle and suddenly the gang is stranded. Nearby they find a crusty, abandoned motel. It’ll do for the night. Maggie takes her test in the bathroom, comes out, shaking and teary eyed, only to be whisked away from the room by her brunette friend who is not Lacy Chabert. I don’t know these actors names, give me a break. ‘Not Lacy’ tells her that she was once involved in a tragic hit and run and has kept the secret until now. Next thing we know, Not Lacy is out on the road in the night alone. She sees a little pasty blonde girl with a cliche ribbon in her hair. She tries to coax her off the road. Blondie turns her heavily made up head towards the screen to reveal a bloody skidmark on her cheek. Gasp. Lacy gets splattered on the highway.

Thus begins the saga of poorly acted secret spilling and a complete lack of terror. Occasionally we see an apparition of the ghostly little girl, sometimes we get snippets of her ma and pa, doing rather odd things in the basement. There is a lack of cohesion in this one, and no one to connect to. The acting is bad, but not as bad as it could be. Not as bad, by far, as the acting in The Fugue (aka Dead Soon, 2012) that I also watched this week. Yikes. But it’s not great, nothing to write home about, and even I was beginning to think Megan’s performance would be improved if she’d just take her top off.

It had potential, it could’ve been just a little more than your average teen slasher flick, ghostly little girl kills off a flock of coeds. It had the aspect of continuous secret reveals, but the script is weak, and the way in which these folks react to said reveals tends to be laughable and in-genuine. There is nothing scary about this film, the little girl roaming the halls is blatantly exposed right from the beginning, she doesn’t hide in the corners and sneak about, but rather sits in the room with you staring back at you, like she’s ready to ask if she can have some juice and a cookie. There’s an underlying story regarding the previous owners of the motel and some dark child rearing activities, but they are weakly portrayed and from time to time I got distracted, would look back and say, what in the hell is going on here?

Good effort, guy, but no such luck. This is no classic. Very forgettable. It feels like a script Donawho wrote in college and finally got the money to make, but maybe only got a c plus on.