Here's a frightening thought: Yet another movie based on a Stephen King creepout.
Pet Sematary? Maximum Overdrive? Dreamcatcher? Silver Bullet? The King-to-screen pantheon is pock-marked with as many tombstones as the pages of one of the author's novels -- rarely elevated by such classy exceptions as The Shawshank Redemption, Misery and The Dead Zone.
But don't start chiselling out 1408's epitaph just yet. Turns out, this terse thriller is the real deal, adroitly tapping nightmare terrain with surprisingly few stumbles.
It's also refreshingly old-fashioned -- director Mikael Hafstrom opts for suspense rather than splatter -- compared to the grotesquery of the torture-porn genre, which now, at last, appears on the wane.
Should 1408 be the hit it deserves to be, it will serve as one more nail into the iron maidens of Saw and Hostel.
The ever-reliable John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a bestselling author turned supernatural debunker. A hardened cynic who doesn't believe in an afterlife, he's predictably skeptical when he learns of Room 1408 of Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel. Long believed possessed -- and off-limits to guests -- no one has lasted more than an hour inside its walls. Or so goes the legend.
While the Dolphin's enigmatic manager, Gerard Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), warns Enslin of entering this "evil f---ing room" -- a maid once gouged her eyes out after being accidentally locked in the bathroom -- Enslin defiantly checks in anyway.
What follows is a spine-tingling one-man play of sorts, with Enslin's cynicism crumbling into unease, then fear, then breathless terror. You'd think the radio alarm clock bursting into song (The Carpenters, no less) would cause anyone to bolt, but Enslin holds firm, even as the clock begins an ominous, 60-minute countdown.
As King wrote in his original short story, hotel rooms are intrinsically unsettling arenas. Never mind who last slept in your bed -- who died in it? This is vintage King, marrying the unnerving with the ordinary, and 1408 may very well do for room service what Jaws did for the beach.
Kudos, too, to Cusack for a gripping performance that remains, regardless of what's happening around him, palpably rooted to reality.
Granted, things peter out in the last act -- did Enslin really require a tragic backstory? -- but these are minor quibbles.
1408 ranks as the summer's smartest, spookiest surprise.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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