This under the radar indie horror wasn't cheap to make, standing at over 2 million dollars Pray for Morning looks a lot better than it's shoddily made cover art and stars horror legend Udo Kier.It tells the story of a right of passage for youngsters to spend a night in an abandoned hotel, but the latest batch are in for the night of their lives as they find themselves getting picked off one by one.Though not an original concept the delivery is, this isn't your standard slasher or ghosty flick it's something altogether different and has character. Sadly the execution is lacking and the film is just plain messy, with an unlikeable cast, confused plot and mediocre delivery this should by all rights have been better.It has it's moments but they are too few and far between, so though it starts promisingly enough it spirals out of control and faceplants hard.The Good:Promising startDeaths are pretty brutalThe Bad:Highly amateurish cover artPoorly madeThings I Learnt From This Movie:Udo Kier is overdue a lifetime achievement awardThe horror genre needs more bone crunching

When this movie first started I thought...Oh No another teen slasher flick! It's about these teens on there graduation night they go to this hotel that is supposed to be haunted. They are gonna stay the night, and go to the individual rooms where these kids from the 80's were murdered.It starts off kinda slow, but really picks up by the middle. What I thought about the movie totally changed, It has twists and turns you really don't know what's going on until the end.This movie was not your typical cookie cutter horror movie. I think you should definitely pick this up.

Pretentious is the word I'd use to describe this movie. The director went "to pains" for many of his special effects and prop pieces which were mediocre at best. The actors were terrible, and their characters severely underdeveloped. The pacing of the movie was also sluggish, as the majority of the kills were children twitching with blue light shining over them. They didn't reveal the ghost until too late in the movie, where you stopped caring.I was most disappointed by the fact that these teenagers appeared to be stupid from their dialogue, but were still able to solve plot points. They were intelligent enough to figure out the curse and puzzle; to figure out from a twenty-year-old bloodstain that the victim was trying to hide something; they could speak Latin, translate "hobo symbols" on the walls, and use old photographs as maps. Yet they died because they separated unnecessarily from the group and then just stood in the same place for extended periods of time. No I'm not talking about the ghosts telekinesis when he held them in place, I'm speaking namely about the character Topher, who stayed behind to cry while his friends didn't notice his absence until the ghost descended upon him. It was extremely artificial, and not in the least bit suspenseful.There are good points to the movie, as the characters seemed to genuinely enjoy each other's presence (save the obligatory fighting couple), which is a dynamic most movies miss on. There were a few good actors in the mix, even though they weren't playing with their best cards. And the story, if re-edited by a different company, could be genuinely interesting.It also had a beautiful and creepy soundtrack, and sometimes (note, sometimes) had the perfect atmosphere for a higher quality horror movie.

I'm a huge fan of horror movies, and this one did a lot right, though some things they messed up.They were right in casting more or less unknowns for the kids. A common mistake in horror movies is that they'll cast stars as the younguns. A, everyone knows that they aren't actually 18. B, No one can watch the movie without thinking of them as stars. There are rare actors that can disguise themselves in their character, but for the most part it's a bad idea to stick them in a horror. It makes it less believable, and therefore less scary. So well done.The bad part was the half-formulaic setup. There WERE plot twists, which is nice, but they messed up. In horror movies, either they stick with the formula, or they do something completely different. In Pray for Morning, they worked in limbo. They stuck to the formula in that the kids who were all about the sex were instantly killed- during the act. This is the puritanical nonsense that moviegoers have lived with for forever. So why? Why kill the sexed first? Then they killed the innocent. NEVER kill the innocent. THAT is non-formula. The innocent should be the last to die, and that's ONLY if there's two. You never kill BOTH if there's more than one. That's bad form.They should have put a story to the light earlier, and shown something other than that the people were standing stalk-still screaming. Also, the kids should've put all the cards on the table from the beginning.With so many criticisms, you'd think I'd hated it. But in reality it was a great show. The creepy brownish light and the ghosts' random appearances were well done, and the actors did a good job. It was gore-y, ugly, and fun.