Year released: 2013
THE CHARGE: Price gouging, eye gouging, brain gouging... pretty much gouging every gougable thing there is to gouge.
THE EVIDENCE: You see that tag line above, just below the web site's banner? "Films on trial for crimes against humanity, decency, and general good taste." I made that up with the intention of being tongue-in-cheek. I love movies and even the low budget affairs I typically review here are rarely ever that bad. But then I witnessed Hotel Inferno, a movie not content to merely wallow in bad taste. It decapitates bad taste, pulls out its innards, vomits on them and gleefully rolls around in the putrid mixture while unleashing a torrent of profanities that would make even the most dedicated vulgarian blush.
The movie opens with an extraordinarily grotesque scene of a hooded man getting his throat cut. Then a candle is lit and as the opening credits roll, we have footage of someone washing a wall. Except the footage is played backwards, so instead of the wall getting cleaner it's increasingly covered with bloody symbols. It's enough to make David Lynch ask "WTF?"
When the movie starts proper, you are Frank Zimosa, an assassin who has just taken a job to kill a man and woman staying at a hotel in an undisclosed country. Yes, you are Frank Zimosa. The entire movie is filmed in a first-person perspective, letting you see all the events in the movie unfold from the killer's point of view. You also have a funny voice, sounding a bit like Jean Claude Van Damme when you're calm and Arnold Schwarzenegger when you're angry. I call it the Van Terminator accent. It's not the type of thing I usually comment on when I review a movie, but it was REALLY distracting here.
Your instructions are to kill the couple in a ritualistic manner: caving in their skulls and removing their brains, then slicing open their abdomens and taking out their guts. Man, Mondays can be brutal, am I right? You're also to wear a special pair of glasses that lets your employer see everything you do while allowing him to give you audio instructions to make sure everything's done right. Micromanagement, am I right? Is this a horror movie or a Dilbert cartoon?
You head off to do your duty and find one of your intended targets sitting in a bathtub already full of blood. He warns you against becoming one of them while he pukes blood all over the walls. You also realize that your female target has a pair of glasses that are exactly like yours. Yep, you've been played, son. But even after you destroy your glasses, you soon realize there are hidden cameras and speakers everywhere. Your now former employer can still see you and taunt you as he sends a zombified goon squad after you.
One of the few scenes without blood and guts everywhere.
We then get roughly 45 minutes of running through hotel corridors and secret passages while dispatching the goons in the most insanely disgusting ways possible. Guns, knives, lead pipes, chainsaws, grenades and more come into play and nearly every death is accompanied by the same silly gargling sound. Fortunately, your pursuers' heads are apparently latex balloons filled to near bursting with raspberry jam and discarded cuts from the local butcher shop. This is the only way I can account for the splatterific ways they die if you so much as poke them with a pincushion.
And this is a big problem with the movie. I have no issue with splatter flicks in general, but Hotel Inferno just paints the screen red with one gore gag after another and none of them outside of the opening scene are any good. I would even say that the initial throat-cutting scene makes all the other gore effects look particularly weak in comparison. Why would you open a film with your best stuff? A scene like that is something you want to build to, and in fact it's even repeated later in the movie. Throwing it in as a cold open just to shock people is a miserable waste of talent.
As the movie goes on, it takes a further turn into the supernatural when it's revealed that the hotel is the playground of an otherworldly creature called The Plague Spreader, who looks kind of like a giant melting skull with sparks flying out of its mouth. And as we stumble into Eli Roth meets Clive Barker territory, another fatal flaw of the movie becomes clear: it's actually trying to take itself seriously! Instead of giving the audience a Troma-esque wink and cinematic shrug to say "This is the best we could do, so deal with it", it doubles down on a story that it genuinely but incorrectly thinks is pants-soilingly terrifying.
Should NOT have had that spicy crunchwrap for lunch.
But as much as I want to dismiss Hotel Inferno as a huge steaming pile of no-budget suck, I can't quite do it. There are a precious few scenes where there's legitimate talent on display. The first person viewpoints of someone suddenly bursting out of the darkness and racing across your field of vision, or of peeking around a corner to get a brief glimpse of something that's after you - these scenes are done extraordinarily well. They're professionally staged, blocked and lit for maximum effect, and it's only in these scenes that this film actually approaches something horrific rather than horrible.
Still, a few tension-filled scenes and one slickly executed splatter effect don't save the movie. They just tick me off more when I think of what we could have gotten compared to the schlock gorefest we ended up with.
THE VERDICT: Hotel Inferno is GUILTY of wallowing not only in bad taste, but also in an egregiously overinflated sense of self-importance.
