The Haunting of Bates Hotel - Welcome to Amateur Hour

Actually... it’s more like ‘Welcome to amateur hour (and twenty minutes).’ This, incidentally, is about an hour and twenty minutes more than you’ll probably feel is worth spending with this film.

‘The Haunting of Bates Hotel’ has no actors that you’ve probably heard of.  Yes, I know, many a great film has been made without stars.  Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt alone doesn’t guarantee a film’s success.  However, this one doesn’t just not have stars; it also doesn’t have actors.  Seriously... these people’s LACK of acting talent is almost amazing.  I know it’s a horror movie and so I wasn’t expecting Oscar-worthy performances, but this is going to extremes.  I really can’t let the bad acting lie... it was like they just let anyone on set and allowed them to say the lines how they liked.

The film is about a *supposedly* haunted house on some farmland in small-town America.  Only it’s not haunted and everyone knows that.  The owners just put on some horror-themed events to bring in the money.  However, a year after some girl gets horribly burned to death by ‘accident,’ more killings start to emerge.

It’s not all bad (most, but not all).  The setting itself is quite a nice place for a slasher movie, i.e. a place where there are already *deliberately* plenty of gory props to confuse and startle the hapless victims.  And there are some nice homages to existing horror icons, i.e. Freddy Krueger’s jumper etc.

But, the odd brief glimpse of Jason Vorhees’ head-sack isn’t enough to save this catastrophe of a film.  It tries to be really funny.  It fails.  It falls flat on every attempt at humour and just comes across as cringe-worthy.  Plus the gore isn’t that good (yes, I know it’s a cheap film, but I’ve seen student zombie films with better effects than this one) and, despite trying to be really post modern and self-knowing, it falls into every horror cliché going, i.e. ‘have sex and die.’

One word: avoid.  If you’ve ever seen a horror film then it was better than this one.  If, by some miracle you haven’t ever seen a horror movie... then don’t start with this one.  If fact, just make your own horror flick with the video camera ap on your smartphone – guaranteed it’ll be better than this!

1/10 This might as well have been written, directed and produced by Uwe Boll