Troubling at times but still with a lot to like

Rating: 7/10 (27 August 2012)

A writer of paranormal activities asks to spend the night in a famously-haunted hotel room hoping for another quick debunking of a tourist attraction only to find that it may be more dangerous to stay than previously imagined.
Overall, this one was pretty mediocre like most of King's efforts. As always, there's something here that works quite well, which here comes from the concept of transporting the scenario of a haunted house into a single hotel room, and those concepts are impressive and generate some fine suspense. A lot of this comes from the great and truly chilling scenes here including the ghostly hallucinations from the woman appearing to attack him in the window across the walkway or the old-time people crawling out the window of the room, although the majority of this one comes from the room interacting with him. These scenes here are where the film really gets good parts as the several different settings intent on trying to terrify him are just absolutely amazing with the utterly irrational behavior that would occur inside such a situation in real life taking place inside here form utilizing disappearing and reappearing objects throughout the room, unexplained reactions to loud radios, tuning into home videos on the TV or around the several different concepts that it plays around with keeping him there. That does lead into a few rather impressive action scenes along the way with his escape into the heating ducts encounter the body there, the later destruction of the postal office to reveal he's still in the room and the finale where he goes to destroy it once and for all where is a great scene here and makes this one quite enjoyable. These's aren't really enough to hold this one off, though, as it just suffers from an over- abundance of clichés that offer up no real surprises here. These really tend to over-play the fact that there's no real amount of logic presented to any of the scenes here since they're so out-of-the-norm for what is supposed to happened in a hotel room to the constant series of mental tortures that keep occurring start to lose their impact due to the non-letup of the pace. It doesn't really build to anything or top the previous gag as it's more a series of scenes that are potentially creepy but just don't register anything that way as we wait for the next scene. As well, there's another problem as absolutely nothing is told of what's going on, as there's no explanation for why anything happens or even if there's anything in the room that haunts it or curses it, since there's nothing given here at all. The last flaw that really hurts this one is a huge heaping dose of melodrama that is unwanted, unneeded and just plain irritating to suffer through, and dragging these out far longer than they should which stand out far more than it's good points.
Rated PG-13: Violence and Language