Kevin Ignatius and Nick Psinakis’ Valley View Motel – they wrote, directed and star – is as much a throwback to the 1990s/early oughts as it is to 1977, when it’s set. There’s a lot of Tarantino and Coens in the mix, and we check off items like uneasy partners in crime chatting in cars, left-field turns into torture porn, venal characters selling each other out, a mcguffin-like bag of shining diamonds due to be exchanged for a holdall full of cash, a streak of Jim Thompson-ish desperation, some tricksy intercutting, and odd non sequiturs which turn out to be plot points. What it doesn’t have – perhaps for budgetary as much as aesthetic reasons – is a cast full of familiar face veterans and a needle-drop score of K-BILLY’s Sounds of the 70s … which is to the film’s advantage.
Ignatius plays droopy-tached Cliff, the least bad of the bad men after the diamonds, and Psinakis is Hal, the teacher in a suit who moonlights as a hit man/enforcer for the big crook whose crew were stealing the diamonds when the small crooks got in the way turning everything into a bullet festival which is over with before the opening credits. Also with Soulo Smith as loose cannon Reg, the kind of friend who gets Cliff deeper into trouble, and Laura Im, as innocent teen Sunny Kang who happens to be stuck in the title motel with her Mom when the ice handover is due to to take place. As the title suggests, everyone comes to the motel – which already has a gruesome racket going on to tie into a long-lasting urban legend about bathtubs full of ice (the other kind) before the crooks, the innocent runaways and the cold killer show up to stumble over each other. We’ve been here before, but this still grips.
The soundtrack consists of original songs in a retro style, which work pretty well. Along with the widescreen yet grainy look, which makes the movie look as if it were playing in a drive-in during bad weather, the music gives the film a texture which differentiates it from the many other similar pictures.