Enter 1408 at your own peril

John Cusack half-smiles as he turns the big brass hotel room key in his hand. 'Most hotels have switched to magnetics. An actual key, that's a nice touch, it's...,' he pauses to let his cynicism drip from the next word he coins, 'antiquey.'

 

'We have magnetic cards also, but electronics don't seem to work in 1408,' Samuel L Jackson seethes, cool as Death. Then pop comes his punchline: 'Hope you don't have a pacemaker.'

 

It has been a really long time since we saw a truly effective American horror film. The good stuff has been gleaned from Cinema of the East, while the standard schlock is more predictable than scary -- or far too gory to actually be chilling.

 

1408 is the best American horror film in ages.

 

Thanks again, then, to the oneandonly Stephen King. It is not an easy task to translate King onto celluloid -- far more misses than rare hits on that list -- but director Lasse Hafstrom (who made Derailed, but forgive the man) does well with this tightly wound scary film that works excellently, for the most part.

 

Cusack, admirably culling a living out of underplaying lightly written characters, plays Mike Enslin, a horror writer -- but not in the King-ly way. Enslin writes little 'travel' books about haunted hotels and traumatised country homes, and, while he obviously has an audience, the cult is unsatisfyingly tiny: empty chairs stare forlornly at him at a book signing.

 

So it is utterly banal when Enslin, sifting through a pile of we're-spooked hotel brochures looking to drum up ghoulish tourist trade, finds a postcard inviting him to a particular room in an upscale New York hotel. Enslin instantly doodles up the four digits, adds them up (1+4+0+8 = 13) and smiles at how obvious it all is. Cute, he says, adding it to his list.

 

What isn't obvious is that 1408 doesn't want visitors. Jackson plays the Dolphin Hotel's general manager, Gerald Olin. In appropriately grave tones, he tries to caution, bribe and tempt Enslin away from spending a night in 1408. His reasons, he explains with the kind of macabre sincerity only Jackson can convincingly pull off, are purely selfish. He doesn't

want to clean up the mess.

 

So we enter 1408, an alarmingly commonplace room. With the comfortable uneasy anonymity we can all relate to, there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Enslin groans as he goes through his same old ghostbuster motions, setting an unlit cigarette at the ashtray, fiddling with some spectrum analysers. The room isn't half as spooky as the manager, he mutters, and then looks the room service card. 'Eight dollars for beer nuts? This room is evil.'

 

And then evil flexes muscle. Suddenly Enslin is under onslaught, the cynic pushed into fear of the most intimate kind, starting with a self-folding toilet roll and a repetitive, suddenly blaring radio -- but moving to extremely hideous territory pretty quick. The imagery starts off completely relatable and heads toward entirely surreal paths, and Enslin soon discovers the horror's just beginning: he can't leave this room, no matter how hard he tries.

 

It's a bravura performance from Cusack, the talented actor pushed to perform a brunt of the film completely by himself, and he manages to both get into the irascible skin of the horror writer, as well as effectively convey his fear -- and his catharsis. The evil room throws his own demons at him, and Enslin struggles to, well, to keep his head above water.

 

And while the buildup is flawless, the payoff, um, not so much. The third act is riddled with holes and liberal doses of deus ex machina. Why must horror films invariably turn anticlimactic? Perhaps the answer lies in building insurmountable evil, and then trying to, before the end-credits, surmount it. It is something the best horror films suffer from, and 1408, while nicely carving a fake ending, also falls prey. And rather weakly, at that. In fact, the third act is itself messy, a jumbled pile of overdone imagery and a painful father-son arc that takes away from a better father-daughter angle.

 

Yet, it is more than worthy. The first half is smashingly authentic in its devices, and the film includes a couple of truly superb scares: a reflection in a distant window, and a walk along a highrise ledge are my favourites. Cusack is in very taut form, playing the role in just the right key, and he makes the film work. Jackson, thankfully underused, isn't doing anything new but feels integral to the proceedings. Sure, bits of it seem loopy but there are enough chills to keep you gripped.

 

The star of the film, though, is the 1970 track, We've Only Just Begun. The Carpenters have never been this devastating.

 

Rediff Rating: