Less than impressive adaptation of a very good Stephen King short story. What else is new...

I loved this movie

The beginning of this movie was deceptive. What I mean by this is that it seemed pretty calm and uneventful! This is quite normal for some of Stephen King's novels as well.

By the time that the real horror has begun, we are entangled in the drama, but by this time it is too late. All too well, we recall the warnings of the character played by Samuel L. Jackson. But we watch on, like, how scary can a hotel room be?

The special effects in the room are very realistic and help to suspend our imaginations. The drowning seems imminent and we feel relief when the review writer (beware..) washed up, and it seems that the nightmare is finally over. Or so it seems and it all begins again.

By the time that it ends, I personally was freaked out. I like to read Stephen King, but am not often impressed when the stories are made into films. This was one that worked for me.

A thriller rather than a gory horror, it kept me on the edge of my seat!

Based on a Stephen King story, which is always a bad sign for me. A friend who happens to be a "girl" (as opposed to a "girlfriend") lent it to me recently and I felt obliged to watch it. It starts off reasonably well. John Cusack, a fairly good actor who seems to improve with time, plays a horror author (I know they say write about what you know, but does King ever have a protagonist who isn't an author, usually a "horror author"?) determined to spend the night in the purportedly "haunted" room 1408 at a NY hotel. Samuel Jackson has about 5 minutes of screen time playing...what else?...Samuel Jackson (not to give the wrong impression-- I like Jackson, and think he's talented, but he really needs to stretch a bit artistically and play some other character besides himself). After that...without giving too much away...events proceed pretty much as you'd expect with a Stephen King based horror movie, or any horror movie made during the last 30 years or so. Some of what happens works; a lot more of it drags on and predictably on. Note to future film-makers: oceans of blood flowing out of walls and ceilings and sinks isn't scary anymore on film, if it ever was. While often entertaining, King has never, in all the time I've read him (I first read "Salem's Lot" at 15 and actually liked it a lot), ever created a convincingly human character. He's gotten a bit more adept at it over the decades, but his characters to me still come across as something from a daytime soap opera. In a word-- phony, as is the dialogue that comes from their mouths. Which is fine except that King often writes about all-too real, very ugly things-- like child abuse, the death of children, emotional abuse by parents, spousal abuse, homicide, alcoholism, etc.. And coming from King, it never rings true, cheapening and exploiting real-life horror in the name of melodrama. In King's world, a father may break his young son's arm in anger, but only after drinking heavily, because he's essentially a decent, baseball-watchin', cheeseburger eatin' "regular Joe" (not to be confused with Joe the Plumber), and he's always tortured by guilt afterward. People are a lot more complex (not to mention nasty and depraved) than King is ever capable of showing, not nearly as bland and conventional as he invariably depicts them, and King just doesn't seem to have the talent to convey this. Not to say he's to blame for this; King himself has said he does the best he can with what talent he's got. He's come close on occasion-- the father in "Pet Cemetery" is probably as near to a multi-layered human being as he's yet come--- but it says something depressing about the banality of American culture that King is one of it's best-selling, best-known authors. Anyway...back on track..."1408" isn't quite bad, but it isn't quite good. I found myself looking at my watch a lot during the last hour or so. Think of it as a scaled-down "The Shining" that takes place in a hotel room rather than an entire hotel. Not a ringing endorsement, true, but it's a lot better than the movie about the demon-possessed car, or the demon-possessed lawn mower, or the homicidal "blue-balls", or...

I was skeptical as to how good this movie could be.  It's really weird and at times hard to follow, but overall the movie was above average.