• Bad Times at the El Royale

    Drew Goddard has an attraction to high-concept ideas. The former Lost and Buffy The Vampire Slayer writer made his feature directorial debut with 2012’s Cabin in The Woods, a slasher meta-horror about a group of teens tormented by secret scientists and their army of canonical monsters and horror tropes. Cabin’s wall-breaking endeared it to genre die-hards, but it’s hard to recall much else the movie did that was scary or interesting. This problem is present, to much greater effect, in Bad Times at the El Royale. Goddard’s second film as writer-director isn’t quite as novel as Cabin, falling more comfortably…