The Innkeepers

Wide-eyed Sara Paxton and hipster-bespectacled Pat Healy play the joint's only two employees, working each other into a lather of what turns out to be well-founded hysteria. Kelly McGillis is a surprise treat as a grouchy medium.

Ghost movies like this, depending on imagination and craft, are much more entertaining than movies that scare you by throwing a cat at the camera.

It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.

West's throwback style and disdain for excess allows his characters to shine.

Slow-burning buildup, lack of explicit mayhem and overall low-tech approach may strike cineastes as amusingly quaint.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

Luke and Claire are guilty, above all, of being dumb and bored. Even their interest in the ghost that may dwell in the dark corners of the Pedlar seems tepid and lacking in conviction. The movie, clever and rigorous though it is, feels that way too.

It's not going to shake up the fright-flick world one bit, but The Innkeepers may earn affection from genre-lovers whose memory reaches back to before "The Blair Witch Project."

A well-shot but generically dull disappointment.

For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.