Hotel Room

MOVIE #1,369 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 02.13.24 Well, it’s that time again: failed mid-90s David Lynch TV review time (everybody’s favorite time). There is a good idea here, I feel, although it might be hard to see buried in the bad VHS YouTube transfer that this three-episode anthology series is available on. Lynch directed episodes 1 and 3 (both were written by Wild at Heat scribe, Barry Gifford). It’s diminishing returns as the 100 minutes drag on, though. The first ep featuring Harry Dean Stanton, Glenne Headly and Freddie Jones is clearly the best. It’s the strangest, sure, but it’s also brimming with a raw energy that the other two lacked. The middle act, written by the novelist Jay McInerney, is fun but felt slight, and the finale featuring Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt was disappointing: the longest of the bunch is essentially dueling monologues, back and forth and back and forth of these two affecting 1930s Southern accents for a weird sorta sob story. Still, it feels like there’s something that could work within this premise, especially with a bigger budget.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
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Hotel Room (also called David Lynch's Hotel Room) is an American drama anthology series that aired for three half-hour episodes on HBO on January 8, 1993, with a rerun the next night. Created by Monty Montgomery and David Lynch (who directed two episodes), each drama stars a different cast and takes place in hotel room 603 of the New York City–based "Railroad Hotel", in the years 1969, 1992, and 1936, respectively. The three episodes were created to be shown together in the form of a feature-length pilot, with the hope that if they were well received, a series of episodes in the same stand-alone half-hour format would be produced later. Following a lukewarm reception, HBO chose to not produce more episodes. It was released on January 8, 1993.