It’s a nice change that Ti West makes old-fashioned, slow-moving, simply-plotted horror films, but I think he goes too far in that direction. I didn’t like House of the Devil either, but at least the ending of that one was overall less lame. Here he gives the lead girl an inhaler (assuming nobody in the audience has ever seen a movie before), allows crappy, predictive string-drone music to detract from the decent cinematography, and sets up a boring haunted-hotel scenario with dense characters who do things like go down to the basement when they’ve been warned not to.

Claire and McGillis:

Claire (Sara Paxton of Last House on the Left Remake) costars with Pat Healy (a Ford brother in The Assassination of Jesse James), who was the one character I kinda liked, because he’s so flaky. He runs a terrible-looking website about hotel ghosts, but he’s lazy as shit and doesn’t seem too excited about ghost-hunting (turns out he invented all his ghost stories). And at the end, after declaring his love to Claire and saying he’ll do anything for her, he flees the hotel in terror, leaving her to die alone (from ghosts? or asthma? we’ll never know!)

1980’s starlet Kelly McGillis plays a surly washed-up actress and spirit-healer, Tiny Furniture‘s Lena Dunham has one scene as the annoying girl at a coffee shop, and George Riddle, looking like a death-bed Gene Hackman, is an old man who wants to die in the room where he stayed on his honeymoon.

Claire stalked by undead Gene Hackman: