Being 13-years-old is awkward enough, but imagine being 13-years-old and having to grow up at a motel, observing all of the sex, drugs and drunken antics going down day and night.
Go ahead. Imagine it. Think of how humiliating AND exciting it could be.
Alright, so now you have a good idea of what to expect at “The Motel”.
13-year-old Ernest, along with his little sister and grandfather, lives with his hardassed mother at a dirtbag motel in the middle of nowhere. When not attending school or doing homework at the front desk, Ernest toils at the motel, cleaning rooms and checking people in and out. He observes various guests bringing prostitutes back to their rooms and he can hear their moans and groans as he passes by their locked doors. Later, he cleans up after the guests, changing bodily fluid soaked sheets, flushing used rubbers and cigarette butts down the toilet and finding the occasional porno magazine left behind. It sounds like a miserable, disgusting existence and it is, but for a 13-year-old who’s just starting to discover sex, the motel provides plenty of voyeuristic outlets for his curiosities. In fact, there seems to be a bit of an all-new Norman Bates in the works here.
But then Sam, a young Koren drunkard, checks into the motel. When not banging hooker after hooker, Sam is the only guest that pays attention to Ernest, treating him like a human being and taking him under his wing as a father figure…for better or for worse. Soon, Ernest starts breaking out of his shell, but this proves to be a struggle as he’s trying to grow into a man in only a few days. Humiliation and some tough revelations await Ernest. An uneasy good time awaits the audience.
The backdrop of this seedy motel is just the perfect place to illustrate the awkward times of early teen life.
