Frank Whaley must be the scariest motel receptionist since Noele Gordon checked out of Crossroads and headed off for a new life on the QE2.

A bespectacled sleazeball, he's the weaselly guy hapless travellers and soon-to-be-divorcees David (Wilson) and Amy (Beckinsale) look to for help when their car breaks down.

But are those screams coming from his office-come-bedsit real or the soundtrack of some late-night frightener on the Horror Channel?

Bizarrely unperturbed, the hapless couple accept his offer of the honeymoon suite at a discount rate for the night.

However, if they can weather the decor (any colour as a long as its beige), the OK Fruity Sauce spewing out of the taps and scuttling roaches leave them feeling distinctly queasy.

Their bad vibes are ratcheted to the max when David plays a couple of dusty VHS tapes featuring a gruesome killing and rape spree...which appears to be shot in their room.

A quick decko into the ventilation shafts finds the expected camera lenses peering into the suite...and they realise room service isn't of the style they were expecting.

You can't accuse director Nimrod Antal of falling into the common trap of his hapless characters making predictably stupid decisions with the time-worn outcome.

Like the excellent French thriller Them, our two victims-in-waiting do all the right things, a plausible turn of seemingly authentic events which ensures this packs a full-blooded punch.

Up to a (sharp) point.

It's only in the last reel - after some pretty nerve-shredding cat and mouse with redneck home moviemakers -where Antal loses his nerve and we find ourselves at home to Mr Nonsense.

It's a shame because this meticulously avoids the usual cliches - the sliced- up teens, the all-too-realistic gore and the unkillable boogeyman.

Nevertheless, this is one motel hell worth checking out.

Tim Evans