The Resort (2021) forgets to be a horror film until its final moments

Quavo’s first horror movie is here. Yes, the rapper produced The Resort, a new film from Vertical Entertainment that follows a group of close friends on a surprise birthday trip to Hawaii where they plan to investigate a haunted island resort.

Directed by Taylor Chien, The Resort stars Bianca Haase, Brock O’Hurn, Michael Vlamis and Michelle Randolph.

As for the film itself, you might go into as I did, expecting a fun, if cliché, thriller to watch on a rainy evening in, but unfortunately, I didn’t walk away from The Resort with my usual post-horror movie rush of adrenaline.

Instead, The Resort dragged painfully right from the beginning almost until the end. Despite the film having an incredibly short runtime at only approximately 75 minutes, The Resort feels like it’s much longer than that because the majority of the movie is just four young adults walking around Hawaii, talking to each other and arguing over whether or not ghosts are real.

The basis of their trip to Hawaii is to explore a local legend about the “Half-Faced Girl.” The gang watches an online video of a podcaster telling the world to beware of this horrifying supernatural entity and detailing the urban legend of how she supposedly came to be.

The Resort terrifies in its final minutes, but it’s not enough to save the film

I’m not the type of person to use the phrase “literally nothing happens” lightly because I happen to enjoy slow-burn movies, especially horror films, but when I say The Resort consists of more than an hour of (beautiful, at least) scenic shots and good-looking people bickering, I’m being 100% serious. It’s not until the final 20 minutes or so that The Resort remembers it’s a horror movie and things start to go wrong.

By that point, it’s too little too late. What’s really unfortunate about that is the ending of the film contains at least one genuinely disgusting and horrific moment, it’s extremely jarring and at odds with the entire film that comes before it but I was delightfully surprised for the 10 minutes that The Resort felt like the campy blood-soaked adventure I  thought it would be from the beginning. I only wish we’d seen more of that throughout rather than crammed into the final moments.

The Resort will be released on Digital and On Demand from April 30.