My quick rating – 4.7/10. If sneaking into places is your thing, you may have thought, “Hey, maybe a nice abandoned hotel crawl would be fun.” Do Not Enter is here to smack that idea right out of your head, and probably fling a rat or two at you while it’s at it. The movie opens with a terrified blond woman crawling across a filthy floor, which is exactly the kind of Airbnb experience you never want to book. She looks up at something terrifying, we don’t get to see it, and boom. Credits. A bold move that basically says, “Don’t worry, you’ll be confused for at least 30 more minutes.”
Those credits walk us through the Paragon Hotel’s sketchy Vegas property history, and a headline screaming Lansky’s Missing Millions, which Do Not Enter wants you to know is based on David Morrell’s Creepers. Then we meet Diane (Adeline Rudolph), hosting her webshow Creepers – yes, same name – and rallying her “young explorers,” who immediately start acting like the world’s worst group project partners. It’s not even ten minutes (including credits!) before someone tries to steal a chunk of “priceless” wall, and honestly, that’s the most relatable archaeology we’ve seen since The Mummy.
When the wall-heist episode tanks in views, less than “insert your favorite flop joke here,” the gang pivots to hunting Meyer Lansky’s secret millions at the Paragon. The hotel sits in a version of Atlantic City that looks like it’s been through at least three apocalypses and a construction union strike. The rat swarm alone is enough to cancel any future sewer tourism.
To the film’s credit, director Marc Klasfeld and cinematographer Yon Thomas make the interior of the Paragon look wonderfully eerie. And shockingly, the cast isn’t a collection of walking irritations. Cora (Francesca Reale) ends up the most intriguing, while Frank Balenger (Laurence O’Fuarain) shows up searching for his missing reporter wife, Amanda (Svilena Nikolova). His quest is noble, though perhaps reconsidered when the group finds a literal tree full of hanging phones and cameras. I mean, how many red flags does one team need?
Then they find Diane’s missing phone and decide they don’t have time to call the cops because they have to look for her. As if multitasking were outlawed. Meanwhile, a rival gang of scavenger-influencer-morons led by Tod (Nicholas Hamilton) shows up, and their only real purpose seems to be more snacks for whatever creature claims hotel residency.
Beth (Cat Shank, love that name) appears from a closet, Rick (Jake Manley) makes a comeback that prompts a full “HOW?!” from me, and the supernatural threat finally takes shape. A CGI meme monster that looks fantastic in one shot, suspiciously PS2-ish the next, poorly superimposed onto the scene. And because Do Not Enter can’t resist, it closes with an ending that plays it way too safe, proving Hollywood still fears the radical concept of letting horror characters actually die.
The journey is entertaining, messy, occasionally stupid, and absolutely watchable…but that ending, man. It really needed to undergo a rewrite.
