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6TH JAN 2009
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 1408 (15) Starring: John Cusack, Samuel L Jackson reviewed by Matt Arnoldi
In 1408, an adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel, directed by Mikael Hafstrom, Hollywood actor John Cusack gives a memorable performance as Mike Enslin, a ghostbusting author of “The 10 Most Haunted Hotels”.
Whilst he thinks he’s a renowned ghost specialist, this isn’t reflected at half-empty book launches so he has to tour the country responding to people looking for ever more scary places to write about.
Armed with a vast weaponry of geeky devices to test the paranormal plus a healthy dose of cynicism towards the idea that ghosts really exist, Enslin spends nights in haunted places and then gives them marks out of 10 for his future books.
Feeling slightly jaded that he’s not been truly scared recently, Enslin hears about the Dolphin Hotel in Manhattan, where room 1408 that has been made unavailable to guests because of its fiercesome reputation.
It’s a room that has a truly spooky history accounting for a great number of unexplained deaths, so its right up Enslin’s street as a place to go.
 Enslin succeeds with a lawyer’s help in forcing the hotel’s management to allow him in but getting there he encounters Samuel L Jackson as a hotel manager who does everything he can to persuade this spook buster not to enter the scary room.
Its nothing to do with the hotel’s reputation being at stake, its merely because ‘no one generally survives more than an hour in 1408 and I don’t like to clear up the mess afterwards’.
So decent set-up. Will Enslin succeed where others haven’t, or will the room that has some serious form in the unhinging stakes, succeed in claiming another scalp ?
1408 is a film that sets its scene out well – never has a standard hotel room appeared as innocent and friendly, but of course this is merely the lull before the storm, and hotels that appear docile but are really scary places has been done before, just look at The Shining.
1408 is good though, its got a decent sense of humour for a start. When the clock radio starts playing by itself, the Carpenters classic ‘We’ve only just begun !’ and counting down from 60 minutes, you can see that director Hafstrom is going to enjoy watching his lead character squirm in this hotel room of horrors.
Generally speaking the film has to work hard to fulfil its early promise. The room becomes genuinely disorientating and packs some decently suspenseful moments in the scare stakes, and Hafstrom explores some unusual angles (such as the inside of the room’s door lock), but you still feel that he could have made this more sinister still.
You get decent moments – Enslin inching along a ledge outside the hotel window, only for distortions and vertigo sensations to take over, reminiscent of the Hudsucker Proxy and you also get fairly standard overworked horror fare such as blood overspilling out of a basin, but it’s still a great concept – fearless horror writer tries to survive night in nasty hotel room, and Cusack and Jackson have some lively funny moments before Enslin takes on the white knuckle ride in the hotel room from hell.
Provided by The Student Zone (United Kingdom) |
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