MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Hell at Sunset Motel’-a 1950s Mock Film Noir

“Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel” (at the UA Coronet) is a ‘50s pastiche made by moviemakers who seem to see the decade in cracked, chrome reflections. It’s a mock film noir, with a plot that spins lethargically around infidelity, amnesia, voyeurism and murder, and is weirdly off-key and off-base in tone, mood and style.

Hula-Hoops, beatniks, Davy Crockett coonskin caps, rock ‘n’ roll, bomb shelters, ex-Commies and Marilyn Monroe-style sexpots: Writer-director-composer Alien Castle tosses them into his thick, sloggy stew, until his movie begins to resemble a nostalgia novelty shop with odd, nearly bare shelves. There’s little real sense of the ‘50s here.

One character who’s supposed to be a beat generationist, David Hewlett’s Deadpan, is conceived on a level close to “beatnik” Maynard Krebs on the old “Dobie Gillis” show. The details are tossed in carelessly, clunkily, without much regard for humor or social resonance.

The movie takes place almost entirely in a slick period motel--the old Pink Flamingo in Santa Monica--where the characters keep popping in and out of each other’s rooms, spying and hatching nefarious schemes. The plot proceeds like vaudeville, by blackouts. Every 30 minutes or so, anti-heroine Bridey DeSoto (Sherilyn Fenn) gets amnesia and wakes up to another disappearance or murder, while motel manager Perry (Paul Bartel), a petulant peeping Tom, keeps filling in the blanks, unreliably.

There’s something promising in this idea, possibilities for a mix of Feydeau-style bedroom farce and a sub-”Kiss Me Deadly” shocker, and the movie also flirts with the notion of some “Twilight Zone-ish” ’50s hell. But Castle is like a lot of post-’80s genre moviemakers. He seems to have conceived his film entirely in shots and archetypes, dreaming up flashy credits sequences while the story and characters disintegrate.

Castle patterns his movie after the 1953 Marilyn Monroe-Henry Hathaway thriller “Niagara,” and he also may be thinking of the sexy ‘50s crime paperbacks, the Gold Medal Originals by Jim Thompson or Harry Whittington. But, compared to them, he has no verbal style, not even on a minor reportorial level; the dialogue here is minimalist, arch and phony-sounding. Among the cast, only Bartel and David Johansen--playing a greasy blackmailer named Auggie March, presumably in honor of Saul Bellow’s footloose Chicagoan--occasionally flounder their way up from the torpor-heavy Mondo Luau Lounge gloom. After a while, the movie’s over-lugubrious texture becomes deadening. “Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel” (rated PG-13, despite seamy situations) is a would-be comic sexy thriller, paced like a tipped bottle of ketchup; it keeps coming at you in slow, red waves.

‘Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel’

Sherilyn Fenn:Bridey DeSoto

Whip Hubley:Chester DeSoto

David Hewlett:Deadpan Winchester

David Johansen: Auggie March

A Heron Communications/Image Organization presentation of a Donald P. Borchers production, released by Two Moon Releasing. Director/screenplay Alien Castle. Producer Donald P. Borchers. Executive producers Pierre David, Glenn Greene, David Bixler. Cinematographer Jamie Thompson. Editor James Gavin Bedford. Costumes Betty Pache Madden. Music Doug Walter, Castle. Production design Michael Clausen. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.