Horror Movie Review: Pray for Morning (2006)

Sloppy, dull, clichéd, and looking like a product of the mid-late 90s rather than 2006 (or 2004, the year it is set), Pray for Morning comes from writer and director Cartney Wearn.

Think of every single cliché you can about a group of high-schoolers (played by people obviously older) going into an abandoned hotel that is said to be haunted and you will know pretty much every beat that Pray for Morning hits. So generic is most of the film, that the few things it does differently, gets lost in a miasma of meh.

It’s a rite of passage for graduating students to spend the night in an opulent abandoned hotel that is said to be haunted. It has seen a lot of death over its years of existence, with the latest occurring in 1984 when a different group of students went in and were all mysteriously murdered. The culprit was never found, and of course, this building is super easy to break into.

Not only that, navigating its pitch-dark halls and not falling through rotting floors is not a concern for a set of character so bland, they could have come from any other film. Hell, the idea of them having to deal with structural and safety issues in the hotel would at least be interesting and get better acting from a group who really struggle to take their roles seriously.

The cast is poor, but the characters are terrible, so you can’t really be too hard on anyone here. Even if some are clearly not trying and others are trying too hard. We see you Jonathon Trent, half-assing it over there and we see you, Udo Keir, putting too much effort in to make your character something.

Jessica Stroup, Dennis Flanagan, Ashlee Turner, Jackson Rathbone, Brandon Novitsky… this isn’t a film anyone is going to want on their CVs. Especially as most of their time in this film is spent walking around asking what is going on. Which is a very good question as Pray for Morning takes a haphazard route to reveal a curse that they unleash by finding a severed hand in the wall near where one of the 1984’s victims laid.

Once the curse does get going, it just tries to be more mysterious rather than revealing who the villain is and why. Even though it’s pretty obvious to everyone watching. This means the film stops and starts all the time, jumping between characters, killing the occasional one off, and trudging its way to a twist that is shoulder-shrugging in its impact.

Is it all bad though? Of course not. The location is pretty cool and we do get to see plenty of different areas. The horror is solid, with some gory and violent deaths showcased well. There’s a clever idea surrounding magic and how that is used to transport characters around the hotel, separating them, and/or putting them in different time periods. Alas, all of this good is buried under a mountain of nothing that will leave the mind the moment the end credits roll, if you actually managed to make it that far.