Hotel Inferno is a 2013 action/crime/horror film written, produced and directed by Giulio de Santi.
Review:
This will probably be easier if I transcribe the film’s description direct from their website:
“The contract killer Frank Zimosa has just been hired for a ridiculously lucrative mission by the rich and powerful Jorge Mistrandia. The objective: to kill a couple of people hiding in one of his European hotels. What would look like one of the simplest jobs Frank has ever had is just about to turn into a living nightmare. He will soon realize he’s nothing more than prey for Mistrandia and his army of crazy henchmen that have hiding in the hotel along with an ancient and unstoppable Horror. In their hotels you can only rent rooms….in Hell! See everything through the eyes of the anti-hero Frank Zimosa and boost your mind with an overdose of: nonstop violence, adrenaline, and pure fear, surrounded in a mysterious, deep and twisted story. You won’t just watch it, you will experience it”.
Directed by Giulio de Santi and from the Necrostorm stable, also home to Adam Chaplin, the unique selling point of the film, aside from the utterly gratuitous gore-flinging, is that the whole film is shown in first-person. The ruse that allows this to pass is that Zimosa, as part of his contract, is obliged to don a pair of spectacles that will record all his killings for the benefit of his mysterious employer. This conceit rather presupposes that there was a demand for such an innovation and initial fears that this is going to be a tricky technique to carry over full-length movie (albeit 80 minutes) soon prove sadly correct – angles, characters, motives and spatial awareness all being thrown into the air with good intentions but bad catching skills.
Zimosa (who I kept hearing as ‘Samosa’, a distinctly un-chilling name) is required to only perpetrate the killings using only the weapons (under no circumstances these being guns) provided and remove his victim’s brain and viscera, without ever questioning why. If this sounds a flimsy excuse to show an array of blunt implements being used to cave-in heads, you’re possibly already above the intellectual expectation the film-makers envisaged this movie attracting. Zimosa screws up these instructions almost instantly, condemning himself to becoming a permanent resident in the hotel in a plot that takes what it probably imagines to be a Lovecraftian twist but which is sadly neither lovely, crafty nor twisty.
There is, for those who are less fussy about plot and more picky about innards, a staggering about of lingering gory sequences, executed in an accomplished but rather childish manner. To allow for the relatively costly effects, much money was evidently saved on the actors and script – essentially there are only three roles that require voices, Zimosa (Rayner Bourton (Outland, You’re Dead), his nagging girlfriend and Mistrandia (Michael Howe, whose career has swung from The Two Ronnies comedy to The Hunger to the Unman of Unman, Wittering and Zigo). All these vocal performances are catastrophic.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue; this film is made almost exclusively for a generation of video game players, who have descended into such laziness that they now require someone to play the game for them. The voice-acting, is entirely in keeping with the unconvincing but to-the-point delivery of innumerable slash ‘n’ dice console games, as is the dizzying pace which dispenses with sense and subtlety before you’ve even begun to query why someone keeps asking for samosas.
At the film’s best, it’s Bad Taste without the fun, at its worst, you begin to feel guilty for not pressing ‘stop’. There are brief moments where the first-person view hints at potentially claustrophobic set-pieces but these are soon shuffled along as neither film-maker nor audience can evidently wait longer than two minutes for a crushed cranium. The DVD is stuffed with extras, a special edition even included a Hotel Inferno cigarette lighter. It’s a shame the audience that would enjoy this best is actually too young to smoke.
Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia
