(Originally written June 28, 2007)

If you add up the digits in 1408, you get 13, and also notice that because many hotels don’t have a 13th floor out of superstition, the 14th floor is actually the unlucky place to be. Clever, but not particularly scary, and that sums up a lot of this movie. However, to completely tear the movie 1408 apart would be unfair because it’s the most fun I’ve had in a movie theatre in a long time. It sports the most effective use of a Carpenters’ song that I will ever see and a fantastic performance by John Cusack, who is for the most part convincing in the way he dealt with his character’s paranoid descent into madness. That said, the movie is pretty awful, full of Hollywood conventions and, amidst a handful of genuinely disturbing sequences, unnecessary attempts at cheap scares that don’t carry the weight of the psychological terror trip that this film so often attempts to be. In terms of the former criticism regarding Hollywood clichés, the film attempts to appeal to an emotional side with Cusack’s character struggling with the death of his daughter, and the terror of the hotel room manifests itself often by taking him back to the emotional pain of the loss. The film really lost me as it tried to superficially give me a sense of Cusack’s character’s pain. It was done coldly and juxtaposed with the more bizarre horror images such that the experience became occasionally uncomfortable.

One of the few merits of this film is the fact that it does not take itself completely seriously. I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody working on a thriller/horror movie can cast Samuel L. Jackson in a role and believe that they are establishing something more than campy self-parody. John Cusack’s visions in the room, or his actual experiences, depending on your interpretation, are also very often very slapstick. A sequence in which he finds the shadow in the apartment building across the way from the hotel mirroring his every move was reminiscent of the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. There is a twisted sense of humor with this film that makes it occasionally work, the same twisted sense of humor that helped to make The Shining, another film based on a Stephen King novel, a masterpiece. However, 1408 is not anywhere near a masterpiece because it wanders, sports dizzying and unnecessarily flashy camera work, attempts to appeal to too many different sentiments, and attempts too much to tie all the loose ends together. The film was good because it had me seriously engaged and interested in what was going to happen to Cusack’s character, but it was bad because it did not take me anywhere interesting or original.