Jun. 19, 2007 - Issue #609: Mother Mother
1408 clever but remains vacant
I love a good hotel room, and the older the hotel the better. They’re creepy in a really interesting way. Impersonality, cleanliness and anonymity disguise a history of human traffic, of wanderlust and homesickness, sex and loneliness.
When you sleep in these beds you sleep with countless strangers, most now dead and gone. It’s no wonder such hotel rooms are so commonly found in scary movies, though they’re not usually so fully at the centre of a movie the way the titular room of 1408 is.
From the author of the dog from hell and the car from hell comes the hotel room from hell. I know, sounds like The Shining. But this time it’s just the one room that makes you go crazy. Fairly typical of Stephen King’s short stories, 1408, which playfully concerns itself with the culture of paranormal tourism, has some terrific ideas, an intriguing set of establishing circumstances, and gradually fizzles out when the spooky stuff inevitably takes over. 1408 the movie is the same but more, particularly the fizzling out part.
Mike Enslin (John Cusack) probably wanted to write the great American novel, but in his early 40s is stuck knocking out books like 10 Haunted Hotels, half-heartedly composed compendiums of nights spent in supposedly haunted places. Mike isn’t a believer. He isn’t even very interested in what he does. His cynicism is grounded in pain—he has a past we learn something about later. Sort of. For now, he’s just waiting for the next cheque.
Mike then learns about a room with an especially juicy history of madness and death in New York’s Dolphin Hotel. (I don’t know if it’s an homage, a rip-off, or a coincidence that King’s creepy hotel has the same name as the creepy hotel in Haruki Murakami’s novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance.) The Dolphin’s vaguely Satanic-looking manager (Samuel L Jackson) tries to talk Mike out of it, even bribing him with fancy booze and access to the secret dirt on the room that the press doesn’t know about. But thanks to an implausible legal loophole he can’t actually keep Mike from staying there. Though the material is handled in a not particularly inventive way by director Mikael Håfström (Derailed), I was with 1408 up to the point where Mike actually enters what his otherwise well-spoken host describes most succinctly as “an evil fucking room.” Once inside, the film, so to speak, goes to hell, yanking out every freaky set-piece imaginable, exploiting every nifty CGI effect at the filmmakers’ disposal, and comes up with a couple of little spooky bits that are actually kind of clever, all for no conceivable reason other than confusing the story and taxing its star’s charisma, forcing Cusack to go on what’s essentially an extended bad acid trip and scream a lot.
Previous parties staying in Room 1408 usually jumped out the window, slit their throats, or ripped their eyes out. Usually within the first hour! What happens to Mike seems somewhat more therapeutic: for all its hair-raising apparitions, the room makes him deal with a lot of family issues he’s been trying to run from, none of which are very clearly sketched out in Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski’s wildly cluttered, overlong and inconclusive script.
Why Mike should fare so much better than the dozens and dozens of poor souls who preceded him is uncertain. Maybe the room gives a special deal to writers. V
Opens Fri, Jun 22
1408
Directed by Mikael Håfström
Written by Matt Greenberg,
Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
Starring John Cusack, Samuel L Jackson, Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.