When you’re staying at The Resort, you can check out any time you like… but you can never leave! Right? Right… like the song?
The last fifteen minutes of The Resort are wild. They are largely nonsensical, but they are gory and creative and surprising and very much the type of thing I sign up for when watching a low-budget horror flick. What makes them even more impactful is that nothing in the preceding hour of run-time hints that the movie is ever going to get around to doing anything remotely interesting, much less anything this over-the-top. The film’s first kill, which takes an agonizing amount of time to get to, is so mild and underwhelming that when it happened I surrendered my last shred of hope that I would be entertained at some point during the viewing experience. Then, POW, director Taylor Chien delivers this final act of grand guignol craziness that has stuck with me ever since. It is far from enough to save the movie, though, and I actually found myself even more frustrated by the eleventh-hour reveal that Chien was capable of delivering the goods. Why then does he direct the majority of the film as if he is actively avoiding any sort of visual flair, barring the scenes that look like a soft-focus YouTube tourism video? (The titular resort is on a remote Hawaiian island, and while it is dilapidated, abandoned and haunted, the surrounding scenery is appropriately picturesque.*) Unfortunately, the plot and acting does not add to the lackluster presentation.
Our main protagonist’s three friends treat her to a birthday trip to the titular resort to investigate paranormal happenings that have reportedly occurred there. She is a journalist, or maybe a journalism student, with an interest in that sort of thing. Even setting aside the plausibility of her twenty-something buddies footing the bill for such an endeavor, the central relationships strain credulity. So much time (so much) is spent with these four just walking and talking, or sitting and talking, or swimming and talking, that you would think that the audience would become intimately familiar with their motivations and shared history. You could even make the case that it would be a valid use of time, no matter how visually un-dynamic, if those conversations made us care about the characters and foster an emotional reaction when they are inevitably thrust into peril. Instead, neither the script nor the actors are able to reveal any depth to the tourists, and you never get the sense that these four people have anything in common. Screenwriters fall into this trap all the time: They need characters with fundamentally different viewpoints and interests to create conflict and add some zip to their interactions, but they don’t present a plausible scenario for why they would voluntarily spend so much time with each other. I can overlook it in most horror films (or maybe not, I guess I’ve commented on it more than once) but the first ¾ of The Resort offers nothing else to distract from the issue. I found myself liking the core group less and less as the film went on and their decision-making devolved into absurdity. So if the movie wasn’t going to spend all of this down time building up the characters, then it could have used it to build up the mystery of the half-faced girl (yes, that’s the name of the movie’s big bad ghost). I’m not one who needs the rules about my make-believe monsters etched in stone, but a little bit of table setting in that regard would have been welcome. As much as I enjoyed the hectic finale on a visceral level, I had no idea what was going on for much of it, or more importantly why. The post-finale stinger, where filmmakers ostensibly set up their sequels, came out of nowhere and had me scratching my head in a way that didn’t spark my interest in a continuation of the story, but rather snuffed it out entirely.
Ultimately, I cannot in good conscience recommend sitting through this slog for the brief handful of scenes that rescue it from being a complete and abject failure. There is plenty more bang for your Halloween buck out there in filmland, and I hope we discover some of it together throughout the month.
* There is of course the obligatory scene where the heroes take in the amazing scenery from a helicopter ride around mountains and waterfalls. For all the contributions Spielberg has made to American cinematic tradition, that one scene from Jurassic Park must be the most commonly mimicked.
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