Film Review – Bad Times at the El Royale

Writer/director Drew Goddard made a big splash with 2012’s “The Cabin in the Woods,” his helming debut. It was a production plagued with problems and missed released dates, yet, when it finally hit screens, it offered a knockout mixture of frights and funny, with Goddard one of the few able to balance the tricky tonality of a horror comedy, especially one that’s glazed up with self-referential humor. Weirdly, it took Goddard six years to get another project up and running, with “Bad Times at the El Royale” his long-awaited follow-up to the genre hit, which takes his career in a slightly different direction, trading mischief for pulp, assembling a crime thriller that returns him to the concept of hellacious doings within a single setting. Unfortunately, Goddard appears less interested in economical, ferocious filmmaking this time around, keeping “Bad Times at the El Royale” long-winded and intermittently exciting, often favoring production polish over storytelling urgency.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com