Darlene shows up with bed rolls, and so Laramie instantly assumes that this young black woman must be a prostitute.Īs you might have surmised, the El Royale, which has lost its gambling license, has many more secrets. Among the new guests are the rather patently phony Father Daniel Flynn (a bearded Jeff Bridges), motor-mouthed vacuum cleaner salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm, mistaking quantity of dialogue for quality), tight-mouthed r&b songbird Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo) and sisters Emily (Dakota Johnson, ditto) and Ruth Summerspring (Cailee Spaeny). Ten years later, a group converges at the El Royale, which has lost much of its Rat Pack and rock star luster and barely has any staff outside of young Miles (Lewis Pullman), who insists only certain rooms at the El Royale, which boasts a jukebox and an old automat of all things, are currently habitable. The action of “Bad Times at the El Royale” begins in 1959 in Lake Tahoe when someone buries a stash of cash under the floorboards of a room at the El Royale of the title, a legendary casino-hotel on the dividing line between California and Nevada.

“Bad Times at the El Royale” appears to be writer director Drew Goddard’s attempt to make a Quentin Tarantino film, and is a 140-minute remix of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and the board game Clue.

El royale casino at lake tahoe