Now THAT's One Haunted Hotel

Rating: 6/10 (23 October 2007)

This competent but ultimately overblown chiller stars John Cusack as an arrogant author who writes books about haunted hotels even though he doesn't believe in spooks. All of that changes when he spends a night in room 1408 in some upscale New York hotel and is confronted with the ghosts (literal and figurative) of a life he's tried hard to forget.
Like much of Stephen King's stories, this one starts out effective and creepy, but it doesn't know when to quit, and the supernatural overwhelms the suspense. The scenes building up to the moment when Cusack actually enters the room are quite unnerving, especially a scene in which Cusack's character talks to the hotel manager (Samuel L. Jackson), who shares the hotel's history with him and begs him not to spend the night in that room. And even the first inklings of something amiss once he's in the room and his vigil has begun are creepy, precisely because of their banality: pictures that tilt on their own, a radio that won't stop playing a Carpenters song. But as the night progresses, the director and screenwriter feel obligated to pile one horror on top of the next, each more outrageous than the one before, so that the film devolves into nothing more than a marvel of effects and production design.
John Cusack deserves a lot of credit, though, for his performance. He's in the movie virtually by himself, and most of the time has nothing but a set to interact with. It's a performance that really belongs in a better film.
Grade: B-