Competent shocker that slightly loses its way

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 2013)

This was setting itself up to be one of my favourite horror films of all time for the first half of the film. However, things went downhill in the second half.
Cusack does a great job as our protagonist as the cynical, small-time hack who spends his time debunking ghost stories, knowing that these stories are just PR for the hotels in which he stays. He sells a few books and they get a bit more business - everyone's a winner! His world-weariness comes across really well in the opening stages but everything goes a little bit awry when he gets a postcard directing him to the Dolphin Hotel in New York.
On arriving at the hotel we are treated to a great scene between Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, where Jackson tries to dissuade Cusack from staying in the room. This scene does a fantastic job of setting up room 1408 in the watcher's mind as we are told about its history, so that by the time Cusack inserts his key into that 1408 lock, the tension is palpable.
The first fifteen minutes in the room is great viewing with the spookiness and fright levels ramping up slowly but surely, but just as the film gets to the fear-sweet-spot, it goes just a little too far and enters into silly/surreal territory which ultimately breaks the atmosphere, and it doesn't ever quite get it back.
This is a film, like so many in the horror genre, that would have hugely benefited from reigning things in just a little as the film progresses. The breaks should have been applied earlier and the spookiness and atmosphere of the room should have been allowed to mature. Instead it just gets a bit too much, to the extent that I lost interest twenty minutes from the end. The atmosphere just dissipated as the vibe went from spooky haunted room to full blown psychedelic acid trip.
It's a bit of a shame as so much good work was done in the early stages of the film, and the production and acting were spot on all the way through.
Some might find the way this film ramps to its crescendo appealing, but I did not. Despite that, it's well worth a watch.