This is a theme that has been done to death. Talking of death, although it will most certainly not frighten you to death, it may well bore you to death. A group of students or student types enter a haunted house for a dare, out of curiosity or necessity, and strange things happen, then spend the next hour walking around in the semi-dark. How thrilling. No, not exactly. Yes, you guessed it, somebody or more likely something is killing them, starting with the resident nymphomaniac and her boyfriend in the middle of a session. What a way to go.There are ghosts, some are or appear to be malevolent. Others...Seriously, if you can sit through this one in a single session without taking a break to watch something genuinely interesting - like watching paint dry - well, you're braindead if not dead already. True, there are a few special effects, but they are not very special. In the last third of the film we get to see what or who is behind the nightmare, a magician who has crossed over to the other side. There is something about a mysterious book, and as this guy is a murderer, why not resurrect the original detective on the case? Yeah, seriously, and at the end they all live happily ever after. Those who survive.

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.

An essay in horrorThose who love horror films will recognize this formula, a group of H.S. kids camp out in a haunted . . . fill in the blank here. To begin with there were too many kids. Six would have been enough. The first hour runs the familiar course A) Background of said location, B) Intro of the kids and their dynamics c) Realization that something is not right and finally d) first deaths. All fine and good.The bad: Never saw a window, never saw the kids attempt to escape after the first deaths. They spend too much time wandering halls looking for the rooms. It took too long to put a face to the green light, and expound on the reason for the haunting. In fact, the movie moved too slowly for my liking. The inner jealousy between Jesse, Dylan and Ashley was unnecessary. With the exception of Jesse, no one really had a personality unless Slut girl, Jealous boy, Stud boy, Nerd boy and Magic girl is enough for you. This last character (the girl whose brother was killed twenty years prior) should have shared her information long before entering the haunted locale. For gosh sakes, there is no good reason why she wouldn't. Furthermore as the story progressed she reveals even more (when the time is right) Why? And finally, the last half hour was populated by too many characters and their POV of what happened a 100 years ago. The ending was too rushed to explain a rather complicated plot. I don't even know how they vanquished the villain or how it related to the story. Never answered: Why did the villain do what he did in the first place?? What did they villain want anyway. Presumably to come 'back to life'.The good: Very haunting. The time flashes or separation of the cast via magic was cool. Loved that Jesse was a reincarnation of a person who was murdered in the original investigation. The discovery of the hands. The concept of the straight arrow hotel detective dabbling in magic to dispatch the villain. (Heck how he did it would have made a better movie) The curse aspect. The hotel itself was very frightening.How it should have went down: Removing the two nerd boys and getting to the curse sooner would have helped. Introducing the villain sooner and diving into Jesse's past midway through the film would have lend credence to the proceedings. The fact that Jesse reveals at the end that he knew all along who he had been in a past life p*ssed me off!! So why didn't you share that info with your buddies, would have saved some lives, dude! Editing would have helped.I have written all of this because I didn't hate the film, I only wanted it to be better. So I say, IT'S WORTH A LOOK for die hard adult horror fans.The acting was fine, the direction, inspiring at times and the story idea was good.

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.