Post by cal125 on Feb 15, 2009 18:31:04 GMT
Having wanted to see this for a long time I finally bought the above DVD, Director's Cut, on Amazon for less than a fiver including postage. WOW! 
The story concerns a sceptical writer, Mike Enslin (John Cusack), rendered particularly cynical by years of fruitless research into proof of the existence of ghosts after the death of his young daughter through illness. He is bitter against his estranged wife as he believes that her comforting young Katie with stories about Heaven and the afterlife blunted the child's will to fight to hold onto life. He checks into a reputedly very haunted hotel room; the 1408 of the title (the Event Horizon bit is part of my review, not of the actual name, that's just 1408!
) despite strenuous attempts by the hotel manager (Samuel L Jackson) to dissuade him. Demon-confronting descent into hallucinogenic unreality duly ensues.
The action starts out with laugh-out-loud "wise guy asks for trouble and gets it" moments; after several minutes of being sarcastic into his tape recorder about everything, Enslin is leaning out of the window when the room's clock radio suddenly blasts out a slushy love song, making him jump and bang his head on the window frame
. However the tone soon moves into escalating scariness and menace as Enslin is drawn further into the room's power and away from the outside world. Impossibly and tantalisingly trapped just on the wrong side of reality, a telephone conversation with reception in which he is increasingly misunderstood and finally unable to communicate at all sums up the slide into the parallel existence created by the force in the room. As he is faced with stronger and stronger images he tries more and more frantically to escape from the room; the extent of the nightmare is clear in what is for me one of the most spine-chilling moments of the entire film when he has managed briefly to contact his wife via a computer and she tells him that she did summon the police, they are in 1408 as she speaks and the room is empty... I won't say how it ends but if you are watching it and wonder how come he has been rescued when the film still has a good 20 minutes to run, don't be unduly shocked if there are still a few twists and turns to come 
Anyone who has seen the magnificent (though much gorier) Event Horizon will see what I mean. Realisation that hallucinations are shaped to the psychological vulnerabilities of the room's occupant; crawls through air conditioning ducts which suddenly elongate; ghostly child voices calling "Mommy?" (though not even on board the Event Horizon has that ever been followed by "Why's the Bible purple?"); pyrotechnics inviting the usual comparisons to Dante's Inferno. It's all there. The inevitable appearance of Katie is so like Peters (Kathleen Quinlan)'s vision of her son in the core of the starship it is as though a wormhole in space has opened straight from one film to the other! Departing for a moment from these similarities, 1408 has a fabulously scary effect of its own in the form of the clock with its red digits which begin to change faster and faster until they are a blur. During my A levels I had a stress dream incorporating precisely that image; I guess I ought to have copyrighted it!
John Cusack does a sterling job which must have been incredibly strenuous as he is in every scene. Samuel L Jackson commands respect as the defensive and unapologetically arrogant hotel manager and Mary McCormack has just the right mix of compassion and brittle grieving guardedness as Lily Enslin. Besides the quality of the film itself, the DVD - this edition anyway - has several deleted scenes, behind the scenes features and the option of a commentary. It is an absolute gem all round.
The story concerns a sceptical writer, Mike Enslin (John Cusack), rendered particularly cynical by years of fruitless research into proof of the existence of ghosts after the death of his young daughter through illness. He is bitter against his estranged wife as he believes that her comforting young Katie with stories about Heaven and the afterlife blunted the child's will to fight to hold onto life. He checks into a reputedly very haunted hotel room; the 1408 of the title (the Event Horizon bit is part of my review, not of the actual name, that's just 1408!
) despite strenuous attempts by the hotel manager (Samuel L Jackson) to dissuade him. Demon-confronting descent into hallucinogenic unreality duly ensues.The action starts out with laugh-out-loud "wise guy asks for trouble and gets it" moments; after several minutes of being sarcastic into his tape recorder about everything, Enslin is leaning out of the window when the room's clock radio suddenly blasts out a slushy love song, making him jump and bang his head on the window frame
. However the tone soon moves into escalating scariness and menace as Enslin is drawn further into the room's power and away from the outside world. Impossibly and tantalisingly trapped just on the wrong side of reality, a telephone conversation with reception in which he is increasingly misunderstood and finally unable to communicate at all sums up the slide into the parallel existence created by the force in the room. As he is faced with stronger and stronger images he tries more and more frantically to escape from the room; the extent of the nightmare is clear in what is for me one of the most spine-chilling moments of the entire film when he has managed briefly to contact his wife via a computer and she tells him that she did summon the police, they are in 1408 as she speaks and the room is empty... I won't say how it ends but if you are watching it and wonder how come he has been rescued when the film still has a good 20 minutes to run, don't be unduly shocked if there are still a few twists and turns to come Anyone who has seen the magnificent (though much gorier) Event Horizon will see what I mean. Realisation that hallucinations are shaped to the psychological vulnerabilities of the room's occupant; crawls through air conditioning ducts which suddenly elongate; ghostly child voices calling "Mommy?" (though not even on board the Event Horizon has that ever been followed by "Why's the Bible purple?"); pyrotechnics inviting the usual comparisons to Dante's Inferno. It's all there. The inevitable appearance of Katie is so like Peters (Kathleen Quinlan)'s vision of her son in the core of the starship it is as though a wormhole in space has opened straight from one film to the other!
Departing for a moment from these similarities, 1408 has a fabulously scary effect of its own in the form of the clock with its red digits which begin to change faster and faster until they are a blur. During my A levels I had a stress dream incorporating precisely that image; I guess I ought to have copyrighted it! John Cusack does a sterling job which must have been incredibly strenuous as he is in every scene. Samuel L Jackson commands respect as the defensive and unapologetically arrogant hotel manager and Mary McCormack has just the right mix of compassion and brittle grieving guardedness as Lily Enslin. Besides the quality of the film itself, the DVD - this edition anyway - has several deleted scenes, behind the scenes features and the option of a commentary. It is an absolute gem all round.
