Mark Reviews Movies: THE RESORT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 29, 2021

One imagines the small cast and crew of The Resort had a good time while filming this flimsy excuse for a movie. It's basically a record of a Hawaiian vacation, bookended on one side by an abundance of repetitive exposition and on the other by a hokey, rushed foray into horror. Writer/director Taylor Chien has basically pulled a prank on us. He and everyone else making the movie got a holiday out of the experience. We get this dull, monotonous, and plot-less mess. No matter what criticisms or insults one might throw at this movie, the filmmakers have won.

The "story" basically is just watching four attractive people on vacation. The excuse is that it's a birthday present for Lex (Bianca Haase), an apparently successful writer of horror fiction, whose friends must be equally successful in whatever it is that they do for careers.

They have arranged a trip to a remote Hawaiian island (The cake they buy her, after purchasing the plane tickets and everything else, is "too much," by Lex's odd math). The premise is that Lex's next book is about a supposedly haunted hotel on the island, and her friends thought this would be good research for her.

The hotel is haunted, by the way. In case we somehow don't figure that out from the initial statement of that fact, Chien makes sure we hear it at least a dozen more times before the quartet even arrives on the island where the resort hotel is.

They keep talking about it at Lex's birthday party. Lex speaks of it to a local police officer on one of the larger islands, in a framing device that sporadically plays through the story and takes place after she's the sole survivor of whatever it is that happened on their research trip. Back at the party, the friends watch online videos, explaining the history of the hotel—its opening, its haunting, its eventual closure and the island's abandonment after multiple ghost sightings. Even the helicopter pilot, flying them to the off-limits isle (which still has people going to and fro on a daily basis for some reason), gets in on the explanatory action. Just ambling toward the resort and making a few stops along the way, the friends keep talking about the alleged haunting.

In other words, Chien tells us a lot of the same things over and over again, and it's not until the final 20 minutes or so of this 75-minute movie that he actually bothers to show us any of them. There is a prologue in which something happens, involving a couple of security guards and an unseen threat, at least, but the rest of the movie, until that anticlimactic finale of death and a ghost and some gore, is nothing more than some wandering and redundant chatter.

The other, disposable characters here are hunky Chris (Brock O'Hurn), skeptical Sam (Michael Vlamis), and generic Bree (Michelle Randolph). Chris has a thing for Lex. Sam argues that ghosts can't exist, while Lex is convinced her dead grandmother visited her as a child (Chien didn't bother telling the other two actors not to talk in the background during the debate, so the conversation is often interrupted by audible chatter). Bree just wants to have a good time, leading to an especially pointless sequence in which the quartet has some slow-motion fun in a pool under a waterfall. Almost every scene following the establishment of the haunted hotel is pointless, but there's still a scale to these things.

The four talk about the same stuff—the haunting, the existence of ghosts, the desire to do some sightseeing, even though they're on a hard deadline before they're stranded on the island for the night—and stroll toward their destination. Upon arriving, we get some more wandering, a couple of abandoned attempts to build some suspense and fake scares, and a sudden concern from the four friends for how late it's getting. As for the extended sequence of horror involving the ghost, it features so much rushing through an assortment of clichés and inconsistencies that we can almost sense the cast and crew trying to get back to their vacation off-camera. The final twist is laughably sudden, hackneyed, and meaningless.

With The Resort, Chien has made a terrible, aimless, and impotent movie. Looking at all the lush and beautiful backdrops here, one wonders if that was the entire point.

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