Horror hotel room is out to get him

What: 1408, directed by Mikael Hafstrom (M) Movie Meter: 4/5

What an entertainer this is. It's a horror thriller based on a Stephen King short story, and it is the best King hit since The Shining.

As it begins, it looks as if this is going to be yet another gothic-horror psycho shooter with rain and thunder and spooky old houses, but it turns out that the recognisable cliches are just the introduction to top actor John Cusack's wonderfully crafted character Mike Enslin.

Enslin is a pretty ordinary author who went downhill after the death of his daughter and now scratches a living writing about ghosts.

His cynicism, supported by such meaningless rhubarb as "psychokinetic fibrillations" is both bitter and tired, and it gives the opening, where he visits a hotel which claims to be haunted, the kind of witty edge which makes this movie much more interesting than the opening suggests.

At a book launch it becomes clear that he has never seen supernatural activity, and doesn't believe it exists, and when he receives a postcard from a New York hotel called The Dolphin saying "Don't enter 1408" he becomes intrigued enough to have a look.

When he eventually makes it into the room, after fighting the hotel system which wouldn't allow him to book, and then the very persuasive manager ("You do drink, don't you?" "Of course, I'm a writer.") who offers him a penthouse suite and an $800 bottle of cognac not to go there, he turns on his tape recorder and dictates notes about just how ordinary everything is.

And it is, until, that is, the clock radio by the bed shockingly and without warning hits the high volume button with the old Carpenters hit We've Only Just Begun.

It is a great set-up, and it works, lulling the audience into that lethargic sense of satisfied "I know what's going on here" and then hitting the first of a series of buttons which are nicely unexpected twists on the familiar bits of the genre.

It is a wonderful example of the old adage: "It is not what is done that counts. It is how it is done."

We know that the room is going to do its best to defeat the intruder using cold and water and fire and fear, but the "how" makes this the great entertainer it is.

There's a superb, edge-of-seat sequence in which Enslin tries to escape the room by climbing out on a ledge.

It is traditional scare-the-audience material, but it works a treat.

What is also interesting is the gradual shift of character from cynical disbelief to dawning awareness of the reality of the haunting.

And there is also the nightmare add-on, which is that the room is out to get him.

This is one of those movies we really need, and rarely get these days.

It is well-made entertainment which doesn't pretend to be anything else.

- © Fairfax NZ News