Synopsis

Storyline:

Six strangers, (Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm, Cailee Spaeny and Lewis Pullman) each with their own secrets, meet at the El Royale hotel of Lake Tahoe. Taking place over one night, alliances are made and secrets are revealed.

User Reviews: An overlong, pretentious homage to Agatha Christie (Ten Little Indians) Steven King (The Shining) and the TV film Helter Skelter, "Bad Times at the El Royal" is a generally tedious, disappointing, and ultimately gory portrayal of "unlikable people acting badly," my personal worst form of cinema.

Individual performances by Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, and Jon Hammx are brilliant, and some production values are excellent, but many of the quick cuts between past, present, future, and contemporaneous events are ill-conceived and anachronisms abound. Why are 1960s songs on a Juke box played on 78rpm records? Why is an impoverished singer driving a mint-condition classic 1951 Studebaker in the 1970s?

Evidently filmed in British Columbia, "Bad Times" so far detached from objective reality as to be allegorical, if not incredible – requiring far too much suspension of disbelief and tolerance of gore to be enjoyable.