Healy and Paxton co-star in “The Innkeepers.” Bring extra pants.
Alamo Drafthouse Pictures had distribute Cheap Thrills beyond the 20 city estimate director E.L. Katz gave last Saturday at the Wisconsin Film Festival. Cheap Thrills is a wild, humorous, even queasy 90 minutes, and a great deal of its success is owed to two of its actors, Pat Healy and Sara Paxton. Healy nails the film’s downtrotten everyman, desperate to do (or eat) anything to provide for his family in a game of increasingly high stakes dares. Paxton plays one half of the powers that be, and while her performance is overshadowed by her husband Vince (David Koechner), Paxton is cooly calculating and cynical in Cheap Thrills’ subtler moments — when there are subtle moments, that is.
Cheap Thrills isn’t the first time Healy and Paxton have shared screen time. Ti West’s The Innkeepers (2011) stars Paxton as Claire, an antsy tomboy, and Healy as Luke, a pitiable sad sack as two employees at the Yankee Pedlar Inn. Over the hotel’s final weekend, Claire and Luke investigate the legend of Madeline O’Malley as her ghost is said to still roam its halls. Paxton and Healy are great together, and their chummy relationship develops in unexpected ways as West slowly ratchets up the horror. Contrary to typical horror machete fodder, The Innkeepers seems to care most about its characters. Claire says her hotel gig is just a thing “in between jobs,” but Paxton smartly sells it as the lie we figure it to be. Healy comes off as genuinely caring even if he’s too much of a perv to show it. Even Alison Bartlett’s alcoholic actress-turned-medium has more purpose and body in a role that seems incredibly hokey on its surface.
Bartlett and really, the story of a haunted freaking hotel work because West is keenly self-aware that he’s telling a ghost story. Characters treat jump scares like the lame gags they are. Claire’s taunting a young boy with a scary story and flashlight is deflated as nothing more than a campfire gimmick. West’s slow burn brand of horror privileges tension and sound design, not cheap scares. Its pacing, like West’s The House of the Devil, is deliberately slow, and while not all of its scares are as effective on repeat viewings, The Innkeepers establishes and holds tension continuously for long swaths of time — a feat of which few modern horror films can boast. No moment is more effective than when Luke and Claire huddle down in the Yankee Pedlar’s basement and draw out the ghost of Madeline O’Malley with an EVP meter, a special radar designed to listen for ghostly wails and unexplained midnight piano playing. Save for some choice sound design, West shows us very little of anything apart from Paxton and Healy’s own faces. He lets his actors do the scaring for us as we listen in on the whiny feedback their instrument picks up. Or was it a ghost that time?
Availability: On Netflix Instant Watch, DVD and Blu-ray