First of all… Ladies, if you meet up with a stranger and he says, “hey come back to my room at a broken down B&B so I can tie you up and put you in a dog cage… as a fetish,” then it’s time to run away. Run away as fast as you can. Also, you probably shouldn’t sleep in plain sight behind a big door only made of glass. If this happens to you and you die, I don’t want to say it’s your fault… but it’s your fault. BNB Hell doesn’t have a high body count because it’s going for a more psychological and suspenseful atmosphere, but when people are murdered, you’re going to slap your forehead in sarcastic amusement. As much as I wanted to enjoy the movie based on the cool poster and inviting synopsis, this was a motel I couldn’t wait to check out of. It truly was a BNB Hell.
I was lost as soon as the opening scene began and someone mentioned the motel being filled with creepy wizard action figures. That’s when I would have left. In the same scene, a figure incognito breaks into the room and they are loud as fuck. There’s literally no way anyone would have slept through that. It was comedy to me in a movie that was trying to be serious. Not to mention the identity of the killer is given away by the body type of the masked assailant entering the room. Again, more comedy and something that made me think, “seriously,” instead of being captivated by terror. I guess the easiest way for me to summarize these thoughts is BNB Hell tries very hard to be a scary movie, a picture that will hold your attention, but it all comes off kind of silly. Amateurish.
Of course, this is the world of independent horror cinema, so every movie involving a motel isn’t going to be Hostel or Psycho. But those movies accomplished a lot outside of their location setting, while BNB Hell struggles to ever get off the ground. It had a lot of potential, but decisions behind the scenes severely limited that potential. I don’t say this often, but I would have kept it as found footage feature instead of a narrative film interlaced with previous clients’ camera footage. I would have put more emphasis on the victims that were still being held captive than the victims who were already dead. I would have stuck with one means of scaring the audience because I thought this was going to have a supernatural aspect to it at one point. Confusion. I would have had a second pair of eyes look over the script and read it out loud because BNB Hell has a lot of awkward moments and weird dialogue. I would have hired a different camera man and cinematographer because the camera work made the actors look sick or whited out the background almost completely. BNB Hell could have been People Under the Stairs meets The Poughkeepsie Tapes, but it dropped the ball every chance it got.
BNB Hell follows a young woman (played by Kimberly Woods) as she travels to a $40 a night motel in California, the last known location of her sister who’s currently on the missing persons’ board. She meets another motel patron (played by Days of Our Lives‘ Rudy Dobrev) and slowly they unravel the mystery and sinister origins surrounding the motel. It turns out the home away from home has a history of tenants going missing, and the camera left on the facility for guests to record the more interesting parts of their stay may be the key to solving the mystery. If only they can live long enough to figure it out. Carol Stanzione, Timothy Lee DePriest, Shayla Famouri, Stefanie Maxwell, Olivia Rush, Jessica Graham and Orion Servine also star in this psychological thriller from writer/director Andrew Jordan. It was co-written and produced by Andrea Harrison with fellow producers Lawrence Adisa and Coretta Thames.
Honestly, I’d avoid this one unless you can see a cheap stream or find it on RedBox. Sorry, team. Final Score: 4.5 out of 10.
