It's easy to dismiss Bad Things as the queer version of The Shining but initially, at least, there are a few ideas worth appreciating here. This should ideally have been centered around Gayle Rankin's Ruthie.. and her trauma, manifestations, and slow descent into absolute chaos. Instead, writer-director Stewart Thorndike randomly shifts perspectives (especially when things begin to get interesting) to the other characters, taking us out of the one-woman-breakdown thread, and desperately trying to blur the lines between what's real and what's not. The entire episode then feels like a pointless exercise in the end, mostly because the perspective then transitions back to Ruthie's and we once again witness her losing her mind.

Also, the scenes that were supposed to induce a creepy feeling absolutely fail to do so. The shots of random people showing up at the restaurant, at the facade, and elsewhere, are laughably executed. If the hotel and its snowy surroundings had terrible history, then we ought to have known that because that'd have added to the atmospherics. I did like how the story incorporated Molly Ringwald's character into the film, and while not a surprise, it's nicely woven into the proceedings. When it comes to performances, I think the cast did a fairly decent job. That's one reason why the film is perfectly okay to sit through, even when it fails on the narrative and horror-inducing fronts.

Ruthie Nodd (Gayle Rankin) inherits the Comphy Suites from her grandmother bypassing her mother (Molly Ringwald). Ruthie reluctantly spends some time at the empty hotel that has seen better times. She is there with her girlfriend Cal (Hari Nef). Another couple joins them. Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) who we later discover has or had some cancer thing and she was once Ruthie's cheat on Cal. Cal is aware of it and they have moved on. Fran is joined by her girlfriend Maddie (Rad Pereira) who adds another person to the script. Brian (Jared Abrahamson) the handy man shows up. Ruthie tells him her mother is not there as it seems he has a thing going on with her. The girls settle in. Ruthie agrees to hear from a realtor even though the other girls in her party have big plans for the place. Odd things happen. Fran claims to see ghosts. Ruthie does not allow anyone on the third floor where her mother stayed because of a faucet leak. She is overly protective of that leak as things get weird.

The film has a good character introduction and a buildup to an ending that was a bit underwhelming. When using a chainsaw, one does not swing it like an axe. It has a good visual effect but so does spraying blood when using it like one should.

Guide: F-word. No sex or nudity. Bean-pole girls in bikinis.

For whatever reason I was swept up in the lesbian melodrama and I've frankly never seen Molly Ringwald looking so hot...but an opportunity was missed here. Instead of trying so hard to pretend this is The Shining (it's most definitely not The Shining) why not accept that Ruthie inherited a crappy motel and not a "hotel"? No one in their right mind thinks the building used in this film is a hotel, or that it was ever "the Four Seasons of the 80s." The motel portrayed here is a stock standard roadside motel and this movie could have been a lot scarier if it were treated as such. There is a lot more gritty dirt you can dig up in such a place - suicidal loners, teenaged drug-addled runaways, murders of street prostitutes in the days before GPS and cell phones (which was a real terrifying true thing, in the 70s and 80s - sex workers were constantly targeted before things like Internet and DNA testing). Plus on top of that there could have been the story about Ruthie's bad childhood and relationship with her mom.

But as it is, Bad Things is only fair-to-middling and because of the way it's presented it just keeps reminding you that it's Not the Shining, which is certainly a bad thing.