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So the psychic tells the girl, "Don't go down to the basement. We have to leave. Now. It's not safe for you here."

So guess where she goes. Alone. Just guess.

But being trite and predictable is not the biggest problem with "The Innkeepers." This horror film's real horror is that it is more annoying than scary.

Worse, if it weren't for the personalities of the three main characters to keep us marginally interested, it would be stultifyingly boring.

You can only take so many slow, creeping journeys down an old hotel's maze of long corridors, around corners and down into the basement. I took to using fast forward to speed up those wordless, repetitive passages, but "The Innkeepers" still felt like a long hour and 40 minutes.

Director Ti West may think he's doing homage to the genre with his bag full of well-worn tricks, but it feels more like he has no imagination. Creaking, rattling and slamming doors, strange noises, foreboding music, repeated use of flashlights shining from under the chin up at the face. A sudden scare when something leaps out at you.

Yawn.

Nor has he fleshed out a back story to give us specific reasons to be scared.

And a scary movie that meanders for 40 minutes without a single scare, and without building up suspense for what's to come, has lost its way.

The Yankee Pedlar Inn is going out of business. This is its final weekend. The only guests are the psychic, a woman who's estranged from her husband, with a little boy in tow, and an old man who wants to revisit the honeymoon suite he shared with his bride.

The two desk clerks, Claire and Luke, decide they will make one last concerted effort to get sound recordings of the ghost that has been rumored to haunt the place for more than a century.

Madeline O'Malley hanged herself after being stood up at the altar. The proprietors allegedly hid her body in the basement for days to avoid scandal. Madeline was evidently not amused.

Perky Claire (Sara Paxton, "The Last House on the Left") and dweeby college dropout Luke (Pat Healy, with an exceedingly strange hairstyle) are fun personalities, and the chemistry between them was droll, though paced too slowly.

It was interesting to see Kelly McGillis ("Witness," "Top Gun") for the first time in years as the crabby psychic who tries, but fails, to steer Claire clear of danger. She hasn't aged quite as gracefully as Tom Cruise, but she can still act.

But the climax of the movie was such a letdown, and so lacking in motivation or explanation, I still haven't gotten over it.

West had a modest hit with "The House of the Devil" in 2009, but he'll have to raise his pacing and suspense from the dead if he wants to keep making scary movies.

Contact the writer:

402-444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com