Pray For Morning (2006)

Pray for Morning starts as a few teen friends decide to spend the night in the Royal Crescent Hotel, a large rundown long abandoned hotel that was the scene of five gruesome murders back in 1984. Jesse (Jonathon Trent) has always been interested in the hotel & drawn to the mystery surrounding the still unsolved murders, he has convinced some of his high school mates to accompany him, during the middle of the night of course because going there during the day when it was light would just be silly. Once there they decide to check out the rooms in which the five bodies were found, before anyone know's it an evil ghostly spirit has been awakened & is killing the teens off one-by-one & unless they can stop it none of them will live to see the morning...Written & directed by Cartney Wearn I watched Pray for Morning last night without knowing a thing about it, the title is rather vague & could have referred to anything so I didn't go into it with any great expectation yet I still found myself disappointed & not particularly having a good time. What we have here is a cross between The Shining (1980) with it's hotel style setting & The Amityville Horror (1979) with the now standard haunted house scenario (spooky property has a dark past, you know the sort of thing) along with a few boring mystery elements thrown in there for good measure. The film spends far too much time showing annoying American teens wondering around this old hotel in the dark, it just doesn't make for particularly entertaining viewing & gets very boring very quickly. The script is predictable & is nothing more than a teen slasher with some tenuous supernatural elements along with an obligatory twist ending which didn't do much for me at all to be honest as I thought it was pretty ineffectual. There is one amazing scene I just couldn't work out, in it one of the annoying American high school teens examines a twenty year old blood stain & determines that whoever left the stain was trying to hide something! How on Earth do you work that out? Also it turns out that whatever the victim was trying to hide they hid inside an nearby air vent so when they were killed how could they have been trying to hide something when they had clearly already hidden it? Also why didn't the police find that severed hand in the vent only a few feet away? According to earlier exposition the police had 'torn the place apart' looking for clues so why not find that severed hand only a few feet away from a murder victim? The police obviously didn't do a very good job, did they? There's no explanation as to how or why there's a ghost in the hotel or how it manages to alter reality or how it can transport people back in time &, of course, the annoying American teens mobile phones don't work for no apparent reason either so they get isolated from the outside world in a now obligatory plot device for low budget horror films. The story doesn't engage or entertain, that character's are both poor & annoying, the plot is forgettable & not that much actually happens.The hotel sets or locations (not sure if they filmed in a real hotel or in a studio) are quite nice but why are some of the lights on? Wouldn't the electricity have been turned off? Horror wise there's not much to get excited about here, there's a few bloody corpses & what looks like a bamboo stick stuck through someone but not much else & there's not much in the way of scares since the less than impressive CGI computer effects have the opposite effect & make things almost laughable. There are one or two bits with a decent atmosphere but it's never sustained for any period of time. The film seems to take itself very seriously & there's no humour or fun to be seen anywhere which doesn't help when the plot feels so stale & lethargic. To give it some credit there are a few period flashbacks at the end which are quite nicely done I suppose.With a supposed budget of about $2,000,000 this has better production values than a lot of recent low budget horror but that's hardly any sort of recommendation on it's own. Filmed in Los Angeles. The only real cast member of note is cult German born actor Udo Kier who doesn't look interested at all & to my eyes seems to put on more weight in every subsequent film he makes (the Steven Seagal of the low budget horror world!).Pray for Morning is a dull supernatural teen horror slasher that doesn't satisfy on any level really, never mind pray for morning I would suggest that most audiences will be praying for it to finish not too long after it has started.

What we call in Spanish NACA! AKA stupid vulgar and cheap. NACA! the acting is stupid. the plot is pointless. the cinematography was almost vomit inducing. the title is cheesy and unoriginal. the editing was disastrous, the lighting was completely reprehensible. the pace was slow. the set looked like the tower of terror at Walt Disney world. (disny's tower of terror was more frightening than this). The opening credits were that of a cheap porn film after-party. Bottomline is that for someone who is studying film (and even those who are not) This movie is a complete waste of time and money. one out of ten stars. I would truly give zero if I could.

The story behind the movie is good, although some of the special effects could be better. The acting is better than anything I could do but, its not Bruce Willis or Whoopi Goldberg quality. Some points in the story just aren't that believable. Who would ever think that power would still be connected to an old abandoned hotel, yet they try the breakers and presto, they have lights!! It must be so easy to maintain an indoor pool, after so many years the water is clear and the pool is still full to boot, I have a hard enough time keeping mine clean on a weekly basis!! And the knife at end, what are the odds you would find one just when you need one? If you can over look all these little things and others like them then its a watchable flick. If you're going to watch this movie with someone who constantly points things like this out, don't. You're better off watching this movie without them.

I watched this movie after having seen it gain a rating of 8 on IMDb. I thought this must be a good horror movie to attain such a high rating (even though there had only been 44 votes at the time). After watching it i can say i am a little disappointed in the movie. Seemed like a low budget movie with poor actors & a fairly simple plot & thats exactly what you get! I thought it was a good enough watch & kept me reasonably interested but the fact that the source of all evil in the hotel turns out to be a stand-up show magician seemed to ruin the whole thing for me. Still watchable but not sure how it gets an 8.0 rating (at the time of writing this comment).