Hit and miss

Rating: 6/10 (2 October 2007)

"1408" is probably the weirdest Stephen King adaptation so far. Weird in that you can't really say that it was a bad movie, but it wasn't completely satisfying, either. In its best moments "1408" seems like a mini-"Shining" with all the claustrophobic paranoia of a hotel setting. Just like "The Shining" this movie works best when normal things like formal voices on the telephone or happy pop songs on the radio all of a sudden become more and more absurd as the main character descends into madness.
The direction in "1408" is good, too, sometimes reminiscent of classic haunted house movies. By filming certain scenes from weird angles director Hafstrom adds to the story's surrealism.
Unfortunately, he makes some pretty painful mistakes, too. The original King-short story was effectively creepy. It was also too short to make for a 90 minutes motion picture, so in order to make it longer the screenwriters had to add a backstory. And what do you do in such cases when you need to stretch out a character's backstory? That's right, you add a dead kid, a divorced wife and a bad father/son-relationship. Everything that's completely by the numbers and doesn't really fit into the story. What's worse is that the backstory is conveyed very clumsily through numerous dream-like sequences that slow the movie down too much and aren't as dramatic or touching as they are supposed to be.
Apart from that, there are a few fine, creepy moments, but mostly we have nothing to be afraid of in "1408". A lot of ghosts move through the room, none of which are very interesting. We witness walls bleed (never seen that before, huh?) and portraits change. The latter was one of my favorite moments in the short story. On screen it didn't look as scary as I hoped it would. What bothered me most, though, was the changed ending all the way to a tacked on, final "shock moment" which was anything but cheesy and out of place.
Last but not least Cusack's performance isn't one of the glory moments in his career. He is left alone by himself for almost the entire movie and he's not awful or anything, but at the end of the day he's just John Cusack locked up in a room for one hour and a half.
"1408" is really an odd movie. I can't believe that a story like this was made the way it has been made in 2007, but people seemed to like it and that's great. This is at the very least an original film in a genre that has become too formulaic in the past ten years, so even if it isn't entirely successful it's still very refreshing to see a horror movie that's different for a change.