Review of The Innkeepers (2011) by Joey S — 26 Oct 2012

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I wasn't a fan of Ti West's previous movie, The House of the Devil, and despite seeing a great deal of potential in the director, I didn't expect The Innkeepers to be much better.

However, I actually enjoyed this movie, and I see it as an improvement on The House of the Devil in a number of ways. It's far from perfect, as the movie still has pacing problems for the first half hour and there's occasionally cheesy dialogue, but this definitely impressed me enough to possibly watch The House of the Devil again.

The movie is very creepy and suspenseful once you get past the dull beginning, which consists of relatively uninteresting character development, and the ending is flawed but somewhat unexpected. Speaking of the ending though, although it is slightly different than that of many other horror movies, it is relatively anticlimactic.

After so much build-up, you would expect some sort of very intense finale, but it goes by so quickly that you feel a little cheated. The one thing I did like about The House of the Devil was the ending, which is what initially made me believe that Ti West had talent.

That movie ended in a very interesting way, while The Innkeepers has less of an ending and more of just a brief scene that doesn't last nearly long enough to be completely satisfied. To be fair, the only reason I'm at all bitter about the ending is because the rest of the movie is actually very good.

Within the context of the rest of the movie, the ending isn't that bad, it just could have been better. As a whole though, The Innkeepers provides some smart scares and overall creepiness while still leaving much of the horror to the imagination.

If you can make it through the slow beginning and don't mind creepiness rather than in-your-face horror, I'm sure you'll enjoy The Innkeepers.