So much average

I wanted to but couldn't!

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

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.

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.

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.