Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
6/27/07
There's
a great Haunted Mansion ride at the Knoebel's Grove amusement park in Elysburg,
PA. You take a seat in a little roller coaster-style car and then
ride along a track through the mostly dark “mansion” while the lights rise
and fall and “spooks” of all kinds are either suddenly in front of you
or come popping out of various holes in the walls. For extra disorientation,
there's a tunnel of strobing lights, an oncoming train whose lights come
on about two feet in front of you and a little shower of water at the very
end. I love that ride (I've been on it a couple dozen times over
the years), and I thought about it repeatedly during Mikael Hafstrom's
new Stephen King adaptation 1408. Just like the ride, it excels
at springing jumping spooks upon you. And just like the ride, its'
plot never really goes anywhere.
Mike
Enslin (John Cusack) is a once-promising writer who's been reduced, after
a personal tragedy, to touring the country and visiting “haunted places”
for a series of third-rate Spooky Travel Guides. An unsigned postcard
in his Post Office Box inspires him to visit New York's Dolphin Hotel,
where the mysterious Room 1408 has seen the death or dismemberment of pretty
much everyone who's ever stayed in, or in some cases even cleaned, it.
The hotel's corporate owners want to silence any publicity and Manager
Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) stopped allowing guests to stay there years
ago. But Enslin only takes this as a challenge, and has his publisher's
lawyers find a way to force him into that room. His stay begins,
with Mike doing a running commentary into his pocket tape recorder, and
soon enough, the strangeness starts. The clock radio starts blaring
Carpenters tunes and then begins an ominous countdown from 60:00.
The window slams shut on Mike's hand, the door refuses to open, and the
bathroom faucets shoot boiling hot water. His phone reaches only
an ominously polite female voice that's clearly in on it somehow.
And then, the spooks start showing up.
So
far, so good. After a deliberate setup, once 1408 locks its'
hero in the titular room, it slowly ratchets up the creepiness until it
reaches a fever pitch of visual and auditory attack. Even at its'
best, there's a certain chilly distance to both Cusack's performance and
Hafstrom's direction that keeps things from becoming too immediate, but
far better horror films have included far fewer legitimate scares.
And then, at about the 2/3 mark, the wheels start to come off. Piling
up false endings and leaning heavily on Ensling's poorly developed tragic
backstory, the final half-hour or so pretty much stops being scary and
builds to a deflating realization that what we've seen is never going to
be explained in any manner better than “Remember The Shining?
Well, it's kinda like that.” Of course, Olin does advise his guest
early on not to seek an explanation beyond “It's a f**cking Evil Room”
(thanks to the MPAA for allotting that single profanity in each PG-13 release
so Jackson doesn't have to go without uttering the word he enunciates better
than anyone else at least once).
Ensling
is on an emotional journey of sorts, but Cusack is unable to make it really
come alive. And after being effectively tormented in the early going,
he runs out of good frightened expressions and starts leaning on ones that
are WAY over the top. Jackson is effectively restrained, at least
until a best-forgotten sequence where Ensling imagines the Manager talking
to him from inside the room's mini-bar. There are few other roles
of note, with Mary McCormick clocking in just enough time as the estranged
Mrs. Ensling to allow the filmmakers to put a woman in the trailer.
What
1408 does well is primarily technical. The sound and sound
effects are very well-done, and those two things are more important in
horror than any other genre. Benoit Delhomme's cinematography manages
to make a cramped hotel room into a wide-open space, while Gabriel Yared's
score is impressively dissonant. Editor Peter Boyle (no, not that
one...) probably deserves most of the credit for the high “BOO!” quotient.
A nice
try at a high-concept Haunted House on a Single Set thriller, 1408
is undone by an underbaked screenplay (or possible the source material,
a short story I've never read) that makes the mistake of putting pretty
much all the good stuff in the middle. Perhaps it could have learned
a thing or two from Knoebel's Grove, where they know how to hit you with
all the lunging snakes and severed clown heads you can handle in under
five minutes and then send you on your way. |
