Identity

Ten strangers stranded at a run-down motel during a hammering rainstorm are being murdered one by one. Any resemblances to Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho are surely no coincidence; Michael Cooney’s script plays like a term paper for a screenwriting class (about a C-minus term paper) by someone who knows little beyond all the movies he’s seen (Cooney actually has a dumb trailer-trash bimbo say, “Remember that old movie … ?”). It’s practically a catalog of slasher-movie groaners, with characters who literally haven’t the sense to come in out of the rain and with a series of cop-out plot twists. Director James Mangold hammers away at the hokum, aided by a slumming high-pedigree cast that includes John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet, Alfred Molina, John C. McGinley, Rebecca De Mornay and Jake Busey.