Awesomely bad

Rating: 1/10 (15 December 2007)

OK, first things first, let's get this out of the way - 1408 is not a good movie. Nor is it a scary movie. It's actually a terrible movie. But that's what makes it awesome.
For those of you who haven't read Everything's Eventual, the excellent short story collection that 1408 first appeared in, let me fill you in - 1408 was no more than 20 pages long. This means a ratio of 5.2 minutes per page. This is a formula that has rarely worked for King (witness The Lawnmower Man), and here it falls flat on its face.
Most of the value of the original story was in the quality of the writing. I remember that, at the time, it actually made me scared. I was like, "Wow, that's pretty creepy." But this movie - not scary. Not even a little bit.
They use every single cliché in the horror movie book - bleeding walls, dead relatives, guys with claw hammers, trick mirrors. In a particularly classy move, they appropriated the ledge sequence from an earlier King movie. In fact, I think that movie was called The Ledge.
Anyway, this is definitely one of those movies that's so bad it's funny. I love how the Room of Terror has a clock radio that only plays The Carpenters. I remember thinking to myself, "You know what, that's just about right." It was a trip watching John Cusack (!) play the "Cynical Burnt-Out Writer" archetype. And the painfully expository scenes with the wife! "After she died, you left, and I haven't talked to you in a year! And now we're not even divorced, we're 'seperated!' I'm like, "way to spell that out!" you know?
So, in the end, watch this movie if it's one of those nights when you want to make fun of a movie with someone. Or I don't know. It looks like a lot of people here think that it was actually scary. Well, in any case, I had fun with it, even though I thought it was kinda really bad.