Seen this yesterday and wow, this is how you do horror and suspense! I liked HOTD better but only because subscribe matter appeals to me more. My only complaint was that I was expecting something a bit more at the end. Besides the somewhat bland (although creepy) ending I thought the characters were great although a little predictable but that didn't bother me. The story don't make this one great either its the set up and execution that is very well done here. 8.5/10

^Sorry, should have been more clear, I was refering to Cabin Fever 2 Lon, that is the one that the producers finished and Ti asked to have his name removed from.

Ah, I see.  Yeah, no interest at all in Cabin Fever 2.  But I just took a sec to look around for word on The Roost and the reviews seem widely mixed.  I'll back-burner that one.

The ending got kinda hokey and was anti-climatic in a way, but not enough to take away from this great film.  This was a great entertaining movie with some eerie parts mixed in.  Loved it.

But, if you say it's worth a look, I'll give it a go.  But if I end up not liking it, it's all on you.

Like I said, I loved House of the Devil because of the set-up, the deliberate pace and West's insistence on allowing horror and suspense to grow from the situation rather than forcing his character to comply with a routine "horror movies have to have a scare every ten minutes" approach. 

But I think where he fails in The Innkeepers is that he does adapt that "one scare every ten minutes" thing, but without giving us anything of interest in between.  It didn't help that the lead character was too goofy for her own good, that the male lead was bland as all get out and the chemistry between them felt forced and clumsy. 

I have no issues at all with West's directorial approach, but I do think he needs to brush up on his storytelling.  For instance, early in the film the lead female character goes to her room, lays down and kick off her shoes, only to go right back downstairs and say she can't sleep.  What purpose did that scene serve?  None.  You wouldn't miss it if it were gone and its omission would have improved the pace.  Worse still, he turns around and has the lead male character do the same thing -- go to bed, only to come back down after a few minutes claiming he couldn't sleep.

The movie has a running time of an hour and forty one minutes; I think it would have been better if it were ten or fifteen minutes shorter, which would have been an easy enough task to accomplish if West were to excise or shorten the dead air in-between scares.  Build up and suspense can only be established when the viewer is made to care about the characters and is kept interested in their plight -- but I didn't, and wasn't.

Carpenter, if you were looking for Action packed CGI or bloody gory scenes you are not going to find them.  But if you want a movie that lets you get to know the characters slowly and build up some suspense before the scares than that is what you get.  I enjoyed the interaction between the two main characters the most, so to me lots happened.

As much as I loved House of the Devil, and as much as I can, and do, appreciate a filmmaker who takes the time to set up his characters and allow suspense to grow and build, he took a little bit too much time in this one -- enough at least to bore me, and I don't watch movies to be bored.  I like his directing style; that slow, deliberate approach with wide master shots and how he frames his shots.  Very Capenter-like.  But with this flick he really needed more stuff happening in the first act because the lead actress, while cute and a good enough actress, spends more time acting goofy and over-reacting to cheap jump/boo scares than drawing me in and making me invest in her.

For all I know the last half of this flick is boffo, but I'm not really interested in finding out.  As it stands, West is 1-for-2, IMO.