a_baron This is a theme that has been done to death. Talking of death, although it will most certainly not frighten you to death, it may well bore you to death. A group of students or student types enter a haunted house for a dare, out of curiosity or necessity, and strange things happen, then spend the next hour walking around in the semi-dark. How thrilling. No, not exactly. Yes, you guessed it, somebody or more likely something is killing them, starting with the resident nymphomaniac and her boyfriend in the middle of a session. What a way to go.There are ghosts, some are or appear to be malevolent. Others...Seriously, if you can sit through this one in a single session without taking a break to watch something genuinely interesting - like watching paint dry - well, you're braindead if not dead already. True, there are a few special effects, but they are not very special. In the last third of the film we get to see what or who is behind the nightmare, a magician who has crossed over to the other side. There is something about a mysterious book, and as this guy is a murderer, why not resurrect the original detective on the case? Yeah, seriously, and at the end they all live happily ever after. Those who survive.

Paul Andrews 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.

tobypang9394 this film didn't have any well-known actors in it, apparently it's a small budget film, but the actors' performance are excellent, especially Jonathon Trent's cast, he perfectly showed the courage and the fearlessness of the young character.The story starts a few graduated kids went to a abandoned hotel where mysterious murder took place, and then found themselves in danger from "someone" in the hotel.The entire plot of the haunting house story is carefully planned, signs appeared one by one, giving a new hint to the killer of those bone-twisted victims, while creating another mystery, first the "this place is not safe" sign, and then those hands. It wasn't easy to guess what these things means actually as the story is just an ordinary haunted house story.The death of the first few friends are quite surprising, they 're not killed each time they got teleported by the ghost, sometimes one survived, sometimes one killed, after their friends were killed hopelessly, Jesse were invited to see the killer ghost, then, the whole atmosphere turned and they started to revenge.A major weakness of this film is that the surprising ending is not clear enough, they director didn't make it clear how Jesse remembered his previous life in the hotel, i couldn't figure it out until i watched some scenes again, it was that when the old women touched him and showed him how she died, she showed him who he was as well, and at the ending, there wasn't any link back to this hint. But one thing i still not sure, how did Jesse bring back his boss to finish the job? Isn't that the curse was solely to trap the ghost and nothing else?

shujaahmad2004 I watched this movie after having seen it gain a rating of 8 on IMDb. I thought this must be a good horror movie to attain such a high rating (even though there had only been 44 votes at the time). After watching it i can say i am a little disappointed in the movie. Seemed like a low budget movie with poor actors & a fairly simple plot & thats exactly what you get! I thought it was a good enough watch & kept me reasonably interested but the fact that the source of all evil in the hotel turns out to be a stand-up show magician seemed to ruin the whole thing for me. Still watchable but not sure how it gets an 8.0 rating (at the time of writing this comment).