Countdown to terror

A run-down motel that rests atop an Indian burial ground somewhere in Nevada; a thunderstorm; an odd motel owner who has a thing about loose women; a group of strangers trapped inside the motel for the night because of flooding; communications are down.

Fortunately a psychiatrist is on hand to explain events when, one by one, the assembled company of misfits and human curios is knocked off.

James Mangold's hugely enjoyable American Gothic thriller is not short of film references. There are nods to Psycho, Ten Little Indians and The House on Haunted Hill and the Indian burial ground is straight out of Poltergeist.

My guess is that Mangold, with his writer Michael Cooney, is having a huge amount of fun blending elements of recognisable genre pictures and delivering them in a cranked-up, visceral B-movie that pastiches them while according them just enough respect to make it work. It is both hilarious and thrilling at the same time.

The film grabs you by the throat from the opening sequences and doesn't let go for the rest of the movie. A series of horrific car incidents is revisited in flashback, and rapid intercutting establishes the links between them. A condemned murderer (Jake Busey) is being transported by a cop (Ray Liotta) hours before his execution.

A beautiful hooker (Amanda Peet) is on the run after ripping off a client. A nervous family of three has a blowout in the rain. A young couple's relationship is foundering after only days of marriage. And a stroppy soap opera diva (Rebecca

DeMornay) is berating her driver (John Cusack) to get her to LA fast.

One by one, the members of the cast arrive at the motel. And pretty soon, we start counting the corpses. First to go is the angry actress who is attacked by an unseen assailant. Her bloodstained clothes are discovered in the motel dryer along with her key to Room 10 - and her head.

The next one down is staying in Room Nine. Before long one of the characters is moved to remark: "What is this? Some kind of countdown?" Indeed it is. This is an artful movie that takes all the conventions and clichés of genre and attempts to reinvent them.

It doesn't quite succeed but what remains is a thoroughly engaging thrill-fest, played brilliantly by all concerned, which has no discernible purpose other than to deliver shock after shock and leavening humour.

The jokes are of two kinds - the postmodern Scream variety designed for the celluloid train spotter and the purer kind arising from some genuinely funny dialogue. When told by the New Agey girlfriend about the Indian burial ground somebody ripostes: "So they all come back to life like Sea Monkeys?"