You won't be disappointed!

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

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.

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.

I never thought I'd feel so robbed of time.I rarely see really bad movies... because no matter how bad a movie is, I always try to overlook the flaws and focus on the merits instead, then it becomes a not so bad movie. And I do that to convince my wife that I didn't waste her time making her watch the movies that I like her to watch with me.But on this one, I failed.Actually, it was my wife who tried to help herself enjoy the film, while most I could do was delay my judgment and not ruin it for her. Throughout the movie all that I could think of was hitting the eject button. In the end, the only thing positive with the experience was that we both enjoyed hating the film.We hated it that when a character, inside a haunted building, sees a kid with blood trickling down his forehead, extends his arm to the kid and says "It's okay!" instead of running like hell. I know, people in horror movies are supposed to do stupid things, that's the way it is, but this one is just way too dumb!We hated it that the characters get teleported during climactic scenes, but never beyond it. They didn't even have problems searching for the clues in every nook and cranny of the hotel.We hated it that there was so much detective work done you'd think they're with Scoobie Doo. Seriously.We hated the clichés of stumbling on the floor while running, rivals fighting over a girl at a really bad time, and a teen couple leaving all the others to have sex while inside a ghost-inhabited hotel. Clichés are forgivable, but clichés that are badly used and looked just plastered on the script is a crime.The monster in this movie, or the element that's supposed to make this scary, is lame, funny at best. The title, while interesting, turned out to be irrelevant to the story. The actors' acting, while not in a drama, can make you cry. Save for the camera, it's really easy to mistake this for a high school project.To each his own, but Pray For Morning for us turned out to be Pray For The Ending.3 out of 10. Is it that bad? Yes. But I'm not giving it the lowest because there were still some elements that could've been worse.

I personally thought that I would be in for a pleasant surprise but low and behold I was mistaken. I don't have any preconceptions about B movies I like to watch all kinds of quality work. This movie however, was not fun to watch. The plot is OK, it isn't written especially well but it's not that hard to listen to. The acting on the other hand was dreadful. I mean painful to watch. It wasn't the horror that had me cringing in my seat, it was the acting. I was looking for a hopeful for a glimpse of an up and coming actor in this movie, surely you won't find any one of the actors in upcoming A movies. They might be seen in one of those late night infomercials instead.For this one I say Thanks but No Thanks.