No Tell Motel

I must admit that the poster/cover for "No Tell Motel" did catch my attention and it was what made me sit down to watch it. Although now I really wish I hadn't. This movie was a complete waste of time in my opinion.

The story is not really particularly great, and it lacks appeal and lacks the ability to captivate the audience. The story seems to be forced together by odd bits and pieces, mixed together with a ghostly little girl. The storyline is somewhat skittish and jumpy, which doesn't really work out to anyone's favor.

As for the characters, well I will say that they were one-dimensional and lacking personality and any kind of magnetism to make you really care about them. They are too generic and shallow, which makes you just shrug on the shoulders whenever something happens to them in the movie. I am sure that the various actors and actresses are good enough on their own accounts, but the characters they had to work with in this movie did them no justice.

Scary moments? Well you have to look long and far for them in this movie, because there weren't any. And as a matter of fact, there were even close to nothing thrilling in the movie as well. "No Tell Motel" is a fairly tame experience for a horror movie, and there are far better ghost movies out there for your viewing pleasure.

"No Tell Motel" was somewhat of a struggle to get through, and more than once I found my attention drifting else where and my eyelids growing surprisingly heavy. This is not really worth the time or effort, unless you have absolutely nothing else to watch, or if you are a hardcore fan of someone on the cast list.

Typical horror film that has a group of 'teens' who wander into an old dilapidated motel after their RV breaks down. But this particular motel houses the spirit of a young tyke who was run over by accident while petting a bunny in the middle of the road. Apparently she's very angry at the dumb way she slipped off this mortal coil and this gang of walking stereotypes is about to pay the price.

Nothing new to see here which could be forgiven for a movie of its type, if it did its well- tread routine with panache or even if the kills were memorable, alas this is simply not the case. No Tell should've been a No Filmed and saved the viewers wasted time and the actors a chance to do something better.

"No Tell Motel" was an average horror flick. It starts out with the establishment of the urban legend ghost girl in a motel. A group of friends are traveling through the area when they have an accident flipping their RV. With no help in site, they are forced to inhabit a creepy abandoned hotel for the night. As ghostly accidents ensue, and the crazy back story pieces itself together, it will keep your interest. It just doesn't capture a level of skillful suspense, but does bring forth some unsettling elements. The young actress who portrayed the ghost was very good. Come into this with low expectations, and you may be entertained by it short running time of 1 hour and 23 minutes.

This film was re-titled "Haunted Motel" when it was shown in local theaters. This actually was already a warning that this is going to be one lousy film. I should have taken that warning.

"Haunted Motel" starts with a tragic accident when a little girl was suddenly run over by a speeding car. Her shocked parents could do nothing but helplessly wail by the roadside in front of their motel (called the Round the Bend Motel). This scene shot in dramatic sepia is the best of the whole film (worth a star on its own). Everything else fell to pieces after that.

Several years later, a group of five young people meet a car accident and were forced to spend the night at an abandoned roadside motel. And, as all horror films of this type go, we see the members of the group get killed off one by one, apparently by a ghostly little girl. Of course, the explanations come at the end, but by that time, you don't even care if you completely get it or not.

During all this time, we get a convoluted and confusing sequence of inexplicable events, told with absolutely no sense of dread or terror at all. Even the ghostly little Angela looked so pasty and fake, you don't really get scared by her. All the characters (a drug addict, a masochist, a rapist, a pregnant teen and her clueless friend) were very thanklessly unlikable, and the actors portraying them did not exactly rise above mediocrity of the material.

This is a generic B-horror film all the way. No redeeming factors either in the story, technical or in the acting departments. This is tolerable only if you have nothing else to watch, but keep your expectations real low.

Getting stranded at a roadside motel, a group of friends find themselves trapped in the area by a gang of ghosts looking to change the fortunes of how they died and must find a way of stopping it from happening.

This is an overall run-of-the-mill ghost film that really doesn't offer too much one way or another about providing good parts or bad. The fact that the whole film barely offers up any kind of rational explanation for what's going on really mar this one because it's the one that does the most damage to what's going on here. The brief running time, itself a problem on numerous levels, never gives us a change to get fully invested in anything or even a chance to develop any sort of coherent storyline between what's happening and who these people are that have stumbled onto the secret, haunted location. It's only in the final, closing minutes that something resembling an explanation is offered for why everything's going on and it's tacky, hokey and completely unrealistic in many ways, offering one of the wackiest and most nonsensical explanations ever for what kind of haunting story this really is. The fact that there's so little time to work through things and just spends so much time on them wandering around the hotel itself in their own little groups with their own problems is somewhat boring and infuriating to sit through, and all of these go right back to the film never offering up a lot of explanations about what's going on in here. There's some bright spots, though, with the fact that the opening explanation for why the particular locale is haunted does make some rather chilling moments than what would be expected in such a film as this, and it leads into the explanation rather nicely as it is. As well, there's a few rather intense scares throughout this one as the hauntings come at quite unexpected times and allow for a few chilling surprises to come out. While not entirely flawed, this one does have enough to lower it from it's supposed strengths.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, children-in-jeopardy, heavy drug use and Rape.