Rooms for Tourists

Proceeds along familiar genre lines. But the denouement comes as a surprise, the five women are great screamers, and the cinematography and music add to the general feeling of menace.

Mr. Bogliano, just 19 at the start of production, has made a promising debut that consistently hits the right creepy points while exhibiting impressive gory effects created with extremely limited resources.

Far grislier than one ordinarily expects from black-and-white, Habitaciones Para Turistas is a real homemade fright.

Director/cowriter Adrian Garcia Bogliano's self-conscious throwback to the kind of gritty black-and-white gore films that used to play drive-in theaters and urban grind houses is a short, sharp shocker that gets surprising mileage out of the oldest formula in the book of the dead.

It'd be great if Rooms For Tourists had a clearer point, or something significant to say about the human condition, but even in spite of its low budget, cruddy look, and modest aspirations, the movie is art of a kind.

The scenario is absurd enough to play as satire, but no, the film warns us, "If you think that we are just a bunch of mental cases you didn't understand anything." Clearly, I didn't understand anything.