The Paradise Motel

Low budget. Derivative plot with a Bates-like motel, among other stock schlock elements. Cheesy dialog. Cast of oddballs, showing little emotional connection with their characters or lines. Direction that makes everything move too slowly, while being more stilted than stop-action photography. All the elements for a potential cult classic, but adding up to a waste of their time, and yours.

The producers needed to make choices they eschewed. Camp it up more for a comedy, or ramp up the nudity and gore for a visceral experience. Or both. They did neither, leaving us with an amateurish production that should satisfy no more than a mere few among those who give this a shot. Too many punches pulled in the moments that could have titillated (at least on the streaming version I watched. If there's a sexier or gorier print that survived someone's prudish tampering, I wish I'd had access to that original instead of this limp remainder.)

Better guilty-pleasure flicks abound. Don't get sucked in by the lurid packaging of this one.