No Tell Motel Movie Review

Runtime: 84 minutes
Rating: NR
Release Date: October 9, 2012
Director: Brett Donowho

A group of friends head off on a trip together in a motor home belonging to one friend’s parent. Each one has their own secret that they keep hidden from the others. Kyle (Andrew MacFarlane) found himself addicted to drugs after a football injury stopped him from going pro, and his brother Spencer (Johnny Hawkes) is secretly in love with Kyle’s girlfriend Megan (Chalie Howes). Meanwhile, Megan also does a pregnancy test on the trip and discovers that she’s knocked up. Somehow this is absolutely shocking and impossible for her to believe because Kyle always uses condoms, and there is absolutely no way that a teenager could possibly put a condom on wrong! There’s also a few other friends on the trip, including Corey (Angel McCord) who is a secret cutter.

After goofing off in the RV, they accidentally tip it over and find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, there is an old abandoned motel nearby where they can spend the night. Things go to hell when they begin separating and find themselves face-to-face with a little girl who actually died in a hit and run accident in front of the hotel.

Kyle is only concerned with finding more drugs and injecting himself with morphine that he finds in one of the rooms. Megan spends much of the movie pouting over her pregnancy and ignoring her boyfriend, though she is convinced he is the perfect guy for her. Poor Spencer wanders around pining over Megan, to the point where you want to grab him and shake him.

The film takes a darker turn when one of the girls sees a little girl in the road. She rushes to save her, and finds herself the victim of an accident. The group drags her body out of the road, and Megan finds herself stuck helping the man who just killed her best friend. Corey meanwhile does the smart job of trying to find some type of help, though it leads to disastrous consequences for her.

You know those movies that you watch and then you feel a little confused later? Yeah, well that is No Tell Motel. I actually wanted to like the movie, but the characters were so unbelievable that it’s hard to root for any of them. Take for example Megan. When she finds her dead friend’s body, her main concern is the fact that the girl has scars on her arms from cutting herself. Instead of showing remorse or sadness, she moans about how she never even knew the girl had a problem.

Then there’s Spencer. He might seem like the lovable goofball at first, but then it turns out that he helped Megan home one night after she passed out from drinking. While cuddling in bed with her, he decided to have sex with her. He calls it “sleeping together,” while she calls it rape, and that somehow justifies what she does to him in the end.

That doesn’t even include the drug addict and the generally unappealing other characters. The movie is also confusing at times, jumping back into the past and then showing our current characters as watching major moments unfold. There’s Mary, the mother of Angela, the little girl who died at the hotel. She finds herself chained to a table and impregnated by a man who might be her husband but might just be some random guy. It’s all just a little too much to take in.

On the plus side, the actress playing Angela is creepy as hell at times. She looks just like the spooky little girl who would haunt a rundown vacant hotel. Sadly though, she can’t carry the movie on her own, which makes me glad that I only watched it once.