Mark L. Smith's screenplay for Vacancy is kind of a remarkable concoction, lifting tropes from maybe a half-dozen other horror movies, both good and bad, in its first 20 minutes — Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer among the good, the Paris Hilton House of Wax among the bad. Hungarian director Nimrod Antal, fresh from his festival fave, the subway thriller Kontroll, brings a quirky sense of spatial relations to the more standard horror practices of quick-cutting and out-of-nowhere scares. The result is an economical (less than 90 minutes) and often brutally effective scare machine that sometimes, somehow, manages to feel less derivative than it is.

The setup is so familiar it's practically quaint. A bickering, soon-to-divorce couple, Wilson and Beckinsale, find themselves stranded on a back road and are forced to take shelter at a near-abandoned motel. Said motel is presided over by a geekily friendly but strangely sinister clerk (Whaley), the room he gives them is nasty; and the videotapes left on top of the TV turn out to be snuff films of murders committed in... that very room. After freaking, Wilson and Beckinsale have to put aside their difference and try to make an escape. There are tunnels, and then rats. (Hey, another lifted trope! From Willard!)

Vacancy could have been some sort of satirical masterpiece had this whole scenario been finally revealed as an extreme form of couple's therapy designed to get Beckinsale and Wilson back together. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by lamenting that this is not the case. The film's actual ending flirts with having more integrity than your average potboiler of the day, though.