Maybe Not a GREAT Room, But...

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2010)

The big - and it's BIG - problem with this film as a horror/suspense flick is simple, and it's all a spoiler: the set-up is far too overdone and the hotel room doesn't begin to live up to it. We're told of horrors so consistently unspeakable that guest after guest mutilates, blinds, castrates himself or herself. A lot. One maid gouged out her eyes after merely moments in the bathroom. And the bulk of the movie simply can't deliver anything that would remotely bring such extremes on. OK, Cusack sees painful ghosts from his past. He also has (harmless)phantoms swinging axes at him and others walking past him to defenestrate themselves yet again. Everything else - chiefly the rooms altered dimensions and implosion - are pretty much triggered by his own actions. As absurd as it sounds, I finished watching, thinking: it ain't all that bad a suite, really. Moreover, again, the filmmakers went way, way too far in promising unheard of nightmare experience. PS Oh, Mr. King. Please. Enough with the cynical writer/hero who wants to write Real Literature but settles for hack work. PPS IF this room has claimed that many lives, why didn't the manager insist on checking in with Cusack every hour or so? Oh - and all anyone had to do was set a fire in the room?