Pretty bad...

Rating: 2/10 (1 November 2007)

***CONTAINS SPOILERS*** I had really high hopes for this picture. Stephen King's short story of the same title, from the book Everything's Eventual, is easily the best story in that collection of very, very good stories. However, this movie falls really far from the mark.
Before seeing it, I decided that I would give the estranged wife/deceased daughter subplot a chance, even though I doubted it would add anything to the story. I also thought that Samuel L. Jackson was a poor choice as the hotel manager Olin (not that I don't love Mr. Jackson, but the casting seemed wrong.) John Cusack as Mike Enslin seemed like a fine choice...
But, even accepting that this is a loose adaptation of the short story, the movie fails as horror movie or thriller on it's merits (or faults.) Most of it seemed like a sloppy conglomeration of recent horror films tactics (the herky-jerky ghosts with old-film patina, creepy-looking, fluorescent-lit "hospital room," a resurrected love one that isn't who she seems, a Shamaylan-esquire enfilade of "twists, etc.) I felt like a was watching a parody of en vogue horror film techniques, not a movie that was seriously trying to be scary.
What's more, everything that made the short story so terrifying was relegated to the background or omitted entirely, starting with the hotel room door that appears off-kilter before righting itself, and then leaning in th other direction. The changing pictures, the changing room service menu, the changing light, the creepy ruminations into the tape recorder of a man loosing his mind ("My brother was eaten by wolves on the Connecticut turnpike!"), the "electric razor that learned to talk" voice shouting from the telephone receiver ("This is Nine! NINE! All your friends are DEAD!), none of these are here or, if they are, they're little more than afterthoughts. What the movie does have--the walk on the ledge of the building, the dream sequence of getting out, the dead daughter--are weak, poorly realized, and not at all scary.
King's work tends to translate very poorly into film. With the exception of Shawshank, The Green Mile, and TV mini-series version of The Shining, Stephen King movies range from big disappointments to downright awful. A big part of this the length of his books; they require so much truncation to fit into a 90-120 minute movie that they can't help but end up shadows of their former selves. Had it been written page for page from the short story, 1408 could have a made an authentic and truly terrifying 100-or-so-minute movie. As it is, it is crammed full of a lot of ineffectual crap an stripped of what made the story so effective; the uncomprehending terror of a man who is not so slowly slipping into madness.