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Thursday, November 18, 2021

Review: Night at the Eagle Inn


Director: Erik Bloomquist

Screenplay: Erik Bloomquist and Carson Bloomquist

Year: 2021


"Night at the Eagle Inn" is one of those movies where I find it difficult to write a review. When movies are very good or very bad, it is easy to collect material to make a point. However, there are films that fall into a gray area, where they do not do anything fundamentally horrible, but they also have nothing that can be highlighted, and those are the kind that ends up being forgotten almost instantly.


Sarah and Spencer are twin brothers who decide to go to the hotel where their father mysteriously disappeared the night they were born. Since their arrival at the hotel, everything seems very strange, but they decide to continue exploring. Neither brother was prepared to face the secrets that the hotel keeps.



From early on it is clear that director and screenwriter Erik Bloomquist is looking both to pay tribute to and to draw references from some famous haunted hotel movies like “The Shining” and “The Innkeepers,” but he didn't do the best job of extracting what he actually led these movies to be successful, which is to be terrifying. The plot also suffers from the same lack of inspiration and is drab and boring.


The main problem with its plot is that it lacks subtlety and everything is too obvious. There is only one twist in the entire movie that I was not expecting and was already suspicious of the person it is based on. Instead of working on a more engaging plot, the writers put all their effort into developing the psychological suspense, but this effort is not rewarded.



Then you have to talk about the cast. You can see in each scene the effort that some of the actors put into their roles, but simply nothing they do works. Instead of getting convincing performances, everything is too overacted and in other cases, you can't even say that. 


I found the performance of the Bloomquist brothers especially disappointing, as the last work I saw of them, “Ten Minutes To Midnight”, was great. But all the technical and plot work that stood out in that film, are the same as that I criticize of the current one. "Night at the Eagle Inn" is a movie with a boring plot and few ideas. Instead of looking for inspiration to make a great haunted hotel movie, it seems they got mixed up with notes and used the ones that listed the don'ts.



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