A late night detour leads to an unimaginable nightmare when an estranged couple's car breaks down on a remote country road. David Fox (Luke Wilson) and his soon-to-be ex-wife Amy (Kate Beckinsale) are forced to spend the night at a seedy motel run by an odd but seemingly harmless proprietor (Frank Whaley). In their room, the bickering couple find a cache of homemade slasher films that look disturbingly real. When they learn that the blood-soaked videos were shot in the very room they're staying in, David and Amy realise that they will be the filmmakers' next victims - unless they put aside their differences and work together to escape.

A tired, quarrelsome couple are driving down a lonely road at night. Their car breaks down just a mile away from a seedy roadside motel and gas station. They trudge back to the establishments to call for help but discover that they have no choice but to stay the night there. The motel manager (Frank Whaley) looks a bit dodgy but harmless.

David Fox (Luke Wilson) decides to watch TV rather than continue fighting with his wife, Amy (Kate Beckinsale). He cannot get any reception on the telly, but there's a cache of videotapes lying around conveniently. He slips one of them into the player and, to his horror, discovers that the scenes of a couple being brutally slashed are shot in the room they are staying in.

Soon David and Amy find hidden cameras in their room and from the noises outside, they realise that they are about to be the next stars of Pinewood Motel's home-made snuff movies! Can the bickering Foxes lay down their differences and work together to get out alive?

"Vacancy" is a slasher-flick with a touch of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho". Okay, it makes the notorious Bates Motel look like a unit at Club Med but under the direction of Nimrod Antal, a maker of Hungarian films, "Vacancy" is so filled with tension and suspense that you will be kept at the edge of your seat throughout the movie.

The plot, by Mark L. Smith, generates conflict and tension on two levels. The first, of course, is the husband-wife rift that any married couple in the audience can relate with. The relationship between Amy and David are so much on the rocks that we can almost see the verbal sparks flying. We keep expecting David to fly off his handle any time.

The other level is the external threat of getting 'snuffed' by the villains. Here, the thrills are delivered thick and fast as the couple engage in a cat-and-mouse game with the killers. Antal gives us little time to catch our breath as he takes us through rat-infested underground tunnels, trapdoors and even up in an attic.

It is only when the movie resorts to its 'generic' ending that we start questioning the loose ends in the script. Like, why would the video-graphers leave incriminating tapes lying around for their would-be victims to view them? Why did David not think of arming himself throughout his bid to escape this Killer Motel? How come Amy, who had been shown as the scared, nagging wife, suddenly learn to take things into her own hands?

However, it is rather obvious that "Vacancy" has accomplished what it sets out to do: to provide audiences with 80 minutes of cheap, unmitigated escapist thrills and spills. If this is primarily what you want, then you would have gotten what you pay for - and the objective of "Vacancy" is fulfilled.

Director Nimrod Antal's last film (Hungarian romance-mystery "Kontroll") was back in 2003 so I expected something good since it was that effort which mostly won him the chance to do Hollywood proper.

Should I give you another take on the synopsis above? A bickering couple, Amy and David Fox (Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson), find themselves stranded in a motel due to the male ego's insistence on never asking for directions and the female inclination to sleep as much as possible on a road trip to avoid arguing over this insistence. No sooner than the two have inspected the deplorable toilet, David discovers some 'snuff' videotapes (like in Nicolas Cage's "8mm") where people get off on watching other people being tortured and killed. The next 24 hours would determine whether Amy and David escapes the motel.

Rather formulaic, there isn't much that's original with this sort of premise, is there? Still, all is not lost because Beckinsale's acting seem to have gotten better lately and in this one, matches up to Wilson's (once you pardon her London accent leaking through her 'panic' lines). As for the suspense value, there were many opportunities to play with the tension, especially in the tunnel scene with rats, where David couldn't help Amy because it was too narrow. Sadly, the screenplay for these didn't manage to convey the true desperation of the characters, an element which only half of Hollywood slasher films get right.

The bane of Malaysian cinema again rears its ugly head, this time with close to what must be 30 cuts, from the catalogue of swearing we could blatantly guess to a crucial scene where we are left clueless as to how Beckinsale managed to get away from one attacker. Antal might have also heard about our Board, since he gave Beckinsale no suggestive scenes in this film - scenes which would surely make the annoyance greater, once cut. Also, this reviewer admits that it could've even been a four-star film, since what was cut could have changed the film significantly in cinematic terms.

Anyhow, if you're a fan of anything from the slasher genre, go watch this. If you're expecting "Saw" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", this is a few cuts below. Cool opening credit sequence, though.