Vastly flawed--because of the source material

Rating: 3/10 (17 June 2010)

Everybody complains when a great novel or short story gets a treatment on film that doesn't do it justice. But what about when a TRULY terrible short story is graced by a talents that makes it almost--ALMOST-- watchable? (Ah, Cusack. I can so much more forgive you for slumming in 2012 than this... And the screenwriters added streaks of poignancy about the life experiences of Mike Enslin that almost bring this into the realm of the existential, but these are nowhere near enough.)
Mr. Olin: During your investigation did you discover the twenty-two natural deaths that have occurred in 1408? Mike Enslin: Natural deaths? Mr. Olin: All told, in the ninety-five years of the hotel's existence there have been fifty-six deaths in Room 1408...
Funny, you'd think any decent investigation of such an abattoir would involve a small army of people to both rigorously record any phenomena and watch each others' backs.
You know, like those "Ghost Hunters" style shows. The kind that bore me to tears. As the "investigators" describe subjective experiences with no empirical basis, or at best "encounters" ("Aaaah! Something scratched my back!") that, if they were caused by any "entity," would be the result of something so pitifully weak it's laughable. Hey guys, get yourself "scratched" by a tiger, a grizzly, a rattlesnake. You won't be lacking empirical evidence of its existence. As Carl Sagan used to say, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Funny how many supposedly classic "supernatural" writers set up Straw Man scenarios to give characters "comeuppance" for intelligent skepticism and intellectual maturity.
S. T. Joshi was right on King. Whatever his *considerable* talents in characterization and accessibility, seen in works adapted to Stand by Me or The Shawshank Redemption, much of King's out-and-out "supernatural" horror--the stuff that MADE his career, ironically--is Derek. Not absolutely all of it, there are still a very few classics like "The Raft," "The Mist," (Now there is not only a good story, but a film adaptation gives an ending that improves on the original!) and so on. But to paraphrase the old saying, you can't make chicken salad from chicken excrement.