Saturday night after the close of the current session of the Space Opera game I run for friends, yes, Space Opera the RPG system from Fantasy Games Unlimited we’re doing throwback to the 80’s for our RPG’s this time around, I watched the horror movie The Vault.

The film came up on Netflix as a recommendation and I was intrigued enough to add it to my growing queue. The premise is that a gang of bank robbers having taken customers and employees hostage during a robbery are suddenly faced with a supernatural threat from the bank’s haunted vault. Starring Francesca Eastwood and James Franco The Vault is a modest to low budget movie that tries the make the most of it limited setting. Overall, I wasn’t bored during the film’s brief 90-minute run time, which fit perfectly with my tired and ready to do nothing mindset after an evening of gamemastering. Ms. Eastwood was perfectly fine as the leader of the small gang who have been driven by desperation, circumstance, and greed into that crime. Mr. Franco plays the bank’s assistance manager who, in a bid to keep the robbers who are edgy and not fully in control of themselves, assists the robbers with vital codes and information about a large score in the bank’s old secret vault.

Haunted is the right word because The Vault is a ghost story and as with most ghost stories there is a secret that must be unraveled before the circumstances of the plot can be fully understood. There was one set-up involving a robbery from 1982 and a masked killer that was never captured or unmasked that caused me to guess wrong about one of the twists and I actually liked that. The twist that was revealed worked and played fair. The greatest fault in the movie is that the director or editor showed too much too soon. There’s a sequence where some of the robbers have been separated and one is confronted by spectral figures while others watch on the bank’s security monitors. The characters watching on the monitors do not see the ghosts and I think the film would have had great tension if the audience had not seen them yet either. If like the witnessing characters, we couldn’t understand of fully hear the attack but frequent cuts to the action and the supernatural violence stripped the sequence of all tension.

Still for a late-night brain mostly off evening The Vault was perfectly serviceable. It is not overly graphic but there is blood and effect work that may disturb some.