Agnes Bruckner - VACANCY 2: THE FIRST CUT

One of the positives of VACANCY 2: THE FIRST CUT is that its existence suggests that the efficiently scary original, a box-office disappointment in theaters, found a wider audience on video—enough to encourage the production of this Sony Pictures direct-to-disc follow-up. Another is that as DVD sequels go, this one doesn’t shame its predecessor.

It no doubt helped that producer Hal Lieberman and scripter Mark L. Smith both returned for the second round. This is another in the reductive trend of prequels that attempt to explain just why their murderers do what they do, but for the first 20 minutes, Smith seems to be onto something as he traces the evolution of his villains from voyeuristic pornographers to snuff purveyors. Gordon and his buddy Reece have a profitable little side business going at the Meadow View Inn, secretly taping the sexual shenanigans of visitors and selling the cassettes. After playing a bit with our expectations for the first slaying, Smith introduces…Smith, a trucker who brings a hot chick to the Meadow View and winds up brutally knifing her, all captured on video before Gordon and Reece’s initially horrified eyes.

They want to turn Smith in, but he offers them a better option: Since sales of their unconsented-to amateur porn are flagging, why not switch to snuff? There are some nicely tense and well-played moments among these miscreants, and the movie would have benefitted from playing out this side of their interaction even further. But of course, the film really needs to center on a small set of young would-be victims, and Gordon and Reece agree a tad too easily to Smith’s plot just in time for recently engaged couple Jessica (Agnes Bruckner) and Caleb (Trevor Wright), along with the latter’s pal Tanner (Arjay Smith), to pull in to take a break from their late-night drive.

From here, the storyline pretty much writes itself, though Smith deserves credit for trying to mix things up a bit. Rather than center on the claustrophobic terror of besiegement inside the motel, as in the first film, he moves the action outside and even to the house of a neighboring couple. The presence of Tanner, who’s your typical smart-mouthed African-American buddy, proves not as annoying as such characters can tend to be, and his simmering disapproval of Jessica and Caleb’s impending union helps spice up the scenario’s tension a tad. On the DVD’s extras, Bross cites Paul Greengrass and city of god as influences, but fortunately VACANCY 2’s handheld camerawork avoids the jittery freneticism that has made similarly inspired films hard to watch.

All this may sound like damning with faint praise, and in the end, VACANCY 2 does eventually fall into its own trap of having to reprise what worked in its predecessor instead of truly breaking free into fresh territory. Yet on those terms, it has clearly been made with a little more smarts than usual, and stands above the flood of uninspired-to-wretched DVD follow-ups that genre fans have been subjected to in the last couple of years. The professionalism all around is reflected in the video/audio presentation, with a moody, high-contrast 1.85:1 transfer complemented by strong Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.

It’s a pretty sharp product for a movie that, as revealed in the extras, was shot in only 19 days. Given the low budget, it’s also rather impressive that the filmmakers constructed a complete motel set to shoot in, the creation of which warrants its own featurette—revealing that while some of the buildings were fully crafted inside and out, others were mere facades . This segment contains the disc’s best anecdote, involving a YouTube video posted by a couple of kids who unwittingly broke into one of the fake-blood-streaked rooms. A separate making-of piece reveals more about the shoot and the design of the Meadow View—including the fact that the look of the latter took cues from, of all things, it happened one night.

On the DVD’s audio commentary, Bross makes further comparisons between VACANCY 2 and the classics NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and THE GODFATHER PART II, and it’s all rather highfalutin under the circumstances. But it does demonstrate that his heart’s in the right place, as does the fact that there’s more attention paid to the handling of the actors and their performances than usual on DVD-premiere talk tracks. The director is joined by Lieberman, executive producer Brian Paschal and stars Bruckner and Moscow, covering the shoot from all angles; Bross and Moscow have by far the most to say, while Bruckner is disappointingly quiet for the first hour. The DVD is rounded out by a brief collection of deleted scenes, including a moment of decision by Gordon that probably should have been left in.