1408

1408, yet another film based on a Steven King story, starts off pretty well, a little slow, but pretty low key, introduces Mike Enslin (John Cusack), our main character, well. Mike's a writer (really Steve? Wouldn't have expected that!!), one that's not doing too hot, events have turned him from "serious" writer to a guy who writes books about various haunted places, in this instance hotels.

And so leads us to room 1408 at the Dolphin hotel in New York and Mike, ever the skeptic, settles in for the night, despite the warnings from the motherfucking hotel manager, played by Sam L Jackson (see what I did there?!).

Still, going ok, a little slow, but we're getting to the meat now, shit starts going down and Mike begins to wig out.

Now it starts to flounder.

Mike seems to lose it a little too quickly, one minute he's just starting to get rattled, the next he's a gibbering wreck, but so far the 'scares' are still pretty low key, the whole thing is taking place in the hotel room and starting to give a nice sense of claustrophobia and creepyness. ("Hotels are a naturally creepy place")

Then the set pieces kick in and it all goes overboard, jumps about and by the end of the film I was left disappointed. 1408 is a film that pretends to know what makes an interesting horror film then descends into overacting and The Haunting territory, shite. And as for 'scares', well there's one near the end as the decent build up doesn't last long enough.

1408 - 5/10