It’s hard to review a movie like this that everybody has seen and knows backwards and forwards, but I watched it on the new 25th Anniversary Oh Jesus We’re Old Edition blu-ray. It holds up, it’s a good movie, and I thought it was worth some words and sentences and shit.

Notice that Corey Feldman doesn't have his glasses or burnt ear on the poster, 'cause he was a heartthrob

It is of course the story of four foul mouthed pre-teen boys in circa 1959 Castle Rock, Oregon walking many miles along the train tracks to find the dead body of a kid that went missing from their area. There’s a tiny bit of plot, because they heard about the body’s location from some cruel older kids who might try to get there first. So there are villains, led by a convincingly asshole-ish Kiefer Sutherland sporting the classic neighborhood bully name “Ace.” But mostly it’s just this simple, slice-of-life type story about the friendship of these kids. Since it’s told from the perspective of one of them grown up it also deals with the hangups they have from the way their dads treat them, whether they can overcome that to have a good life, and how those friendships affect that.

It’s a really well made movie, tastefully put together, funny, sad, very good performances by these kid actors. There aren’t too many kid movies from that era where all of the leads went on to be well known. Most child actors disappear. I guess none of them turned into Christian Bale or anything, but you have Wil Wheaton who was on Star Trek for years (and who I recently enjoyed in MR. STITCH), Corey Feldman who was in a ton of movies (being in a FRIDAY THE 13TH makes you respectable in my book), River Phoenix who got to be Indiana Jones and was starting to be really acclaimed for a bit there, and Jerry O’Connell is still quite a successful actor to this day, and got his dick bit off in PIRANHA 3D. In the STAND BY ME extras Rob Reiner mentions about 250 times that “the little fat kid grew up to marry Rebecca Romijn.”

All of the kids are really good in this movie, with beanpole Wheaton effortlessly taking the lead. But man, O’Connell steals the movie. I guess he doesn’t have to dig into the angst like the other guys do. His character is kind of like Betty White on Golden Girls, just clueless and relentlessly positive. The look of puppy dog excitement on his face as he listens to Gordie’s “Lard Ass” story is my favorite part of the movie.

What really struck me watching this now is how great and surprising it is that it could get made like that, then released, and that it caught on big. I think it’s pretty much a kid’s movie, but rated R for cursing and corpse. The plot is so simple, they don’t add a bunch of complications. It has a soundtrack of all corny oldies, not hip in any way, but people enjoyed it so much that Ben E. King’s original “Stand By Me” became a #1 hit again. (The new commentary reveals that somebody approached Michael Jackson about doing a cover of the song, but director Rob Reiner wisely wanted to keep it pure and vintage.)

I guess part of it was nostalgia. ’50s and ’60s nostalgia had already been mined, but not quite in this context. No hot rods or poodle skirts, it’s young kids and a pretty naturalistic portrayal. Their talk about these songs, cherry Pez and Annette Funicello’s boobs on the Mickey Mouse Club sort of served the same purpose as the CLERKS talking about STAR WARS years later. I always thought that TV show Wonder Years was inspired by this movie, with its narration and everything. But there’s no dead body and the kid with glasses isn’t as angry.

Anyway, it’s an impressively pure and non-formulaic movie that it’s hard to imagine getting made in the modern age. Especially considering the kids’ casual use of cigarettes and stolen guns. The good kid pulls a gun on somebody, and the message of the movie isn’t even “don’t pull a gun on somebody”!

In THE GOONIES I think they were trying to find a treasure to save their houses from getting foreclosed. In this one they’re trying to find a corpse to understand their own mortality. They know that Ray Brower was just a kid like them. Shit, they almost get run over by a train just like he did. In the futuristic year of 1986 adult Gordie (Richard Dreyfus) sits alone in his car thinking about it, because Chris has just died. Gordie thinks back to when Chris stood up for him, encouraged him to learn with the “pussies” in college and become a writer. Chris knew Gordie had a chance to get an education, but he thought he himself couldn’t escape a shitty life. It sounds like did, though. Somehow he became a lawyer. But he still got stabbed to death trying to break up a fight.

Gordie tries to understand Chris’s death by remembering the time he tried to understand his brother’s death through Ray Brower’s death. (And this all gets an extra layer of gloom by the audience’s knowledge that in real life River Phoenix died even younger.)

Why did Gordie’s brother die instead of him? Why Ray Brower? Why Chris? Well, nobody fuckin knows. But now he’s a grown man, he has two kids, he needs to make them feel loved so they don’t have to sneak off and find a dead body in order to find themselves.

How does he feel about his dad now? Did they ever get over that shit? Does he feel protective of his asshole dad the way Teddy did, trotting out the old man’s war record to balance out the horror of the same man frying his ear on the oven burner?

The raw emotions of these kids really ring true to me. It reminds me what it felt like to be that age. They don’t seem so much like movie kids. They’re smart, but not too smart. They get into trouble but they’re not obnoxious like a bunch of Goonies. You don’t feel like you’re babysitting them.

Hey man, it’s kind of like they’re going on a merantau. Going on a journey to discover themselves. I doubt Stephen King went to deeply into the symbolism of the story, but there’s something kinda mythic about it. These kids out in the middle of nature where there are almost no people, only predators like leeches, Chopper and the speeding train. They’re protected only by their loyalty to each other, and their shared knowledge of pop culture and childish sayings. Well, and a gun. But that’s not gonna save them from the train, or from self doubt.

The story it’s based on is called “The Body,” of course, not “Stand By Me.” They came up with the name late in the game, and the song only plays during the end credits, but somehow it fits pretty good. Like in the song, these kids really support each other, they stand by each other both literally and figuratively. (”Lit and fig” would be a hip way to shorten that, let’s start saying it that way for now on. They stand by each other lit and fig.) To be honest they actually are afraid when the night has come and the land is dark, etc. I don’t believe they shed a tear, so that part is accurate.

Hmm. There never is a point in the story where the sky that they look upon stumbles and falls and the mountains crumble to the sea. That would be kinda crazy. That sounds more like “The Stand” or something. Another difference is that in the song Ben E. King is probly talking to a girl, because he calls her “darlin’” a whole bunch of times. These kids don’t call each other “darlin’”, but there’s a surprising amount of hugging.

I guess now that I think about it this is not a very faithful adaptation of the song. The Ben E. King geeks were probly pissed.

But fuck ‘em. Sorry, Beniacs. I like this movie. And it least it was closer to the source material than LEAN ON ME was.

THE RUNNING MAN was a book Stephen King wrote in 1982 when he was on the lam and hiding out under the alias Richard Bachman. I read it back in the ’80s so I don’t remember it in much detail, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same kind of goofy cartoon shit as the movie. It was about a brutal game show of the future where contestants tried to get across the country without being killed. I think there were bounty hunters after them, but also they’d become famous through the show and regular people would try to kill them to collect a reward. It’s like American Idol except instead of participating by calling in you do it by shooting at the guy. The main character was kind of like Kowalski in VANISHING POINT, he ended up capturing the hearts of everybody at home and they started rooting for him to get away.

The book was written before “reality TV” even existed. There wasn’t even COPS or THE REAL WORLD. It could’ve been influenced by DEATH RACE 2000, but I still give King credit for predicting this type of shit. When THE AMAZING RACE started I thought shit, we’re half way there. Just cross this with AMERICA’S MOST WANTED.

But the movie crosses it with AMERICAN GLADIATORS, which is kind of dumb but fun in its own way. They put the contestants in an enclosed maze, make them wear shiny jumpsuits and send “Stalkers” after them – fighters with corny nicknames, costumes and gimmicks. The best are Sub-Zero (Professor Toru Tanaka with a bladed hockey stick and exploding puck), Fireball (Jim Brown with flamethrower, jetpack and skunk stripes in his hair), and Dynamo (a fat guy in light-up Spartan armor who sings opera and shoots electricity from his hands). In the studio old ladies from the audience tell the host Killian (Richard Dawson from FAMILY FEUD) who their favorites are, in the streets people bet on who will draw first blood. They’re blood thirsty but mostly they’re brainwashed – they’ve been taught these are the good guys so they root for them. When the actual good guy fights back they don’t approve of his violence.

That good guy is… Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a cop working in a police state who refused a command to fire on unarmed rioters. So they locked him up. The corporate/state media plays edited footage to make it look like he did fire on civilians and play him up as a villain for their TV show. Meanwhile, Maria Conchita Alonso (Salma Hayek of the ’80s) is a network employee who figures out he’s innocent, so they say she’s a ho and put her in the game too.

The satire is broad, but pretty good. When Killian needs to pull some strings he first calls the Justice Department – Entertainment Division, then changes his mind and calls the president’s agent. To cover the legality of becoming a contestant they appoint an agent, not a lawyer.

More than the ol’ “people want violent entertainment” saw it makes the more important point that no matter who runs the media – in this case both corporations and the government, because they’re the same thing – it creates a conflict of interest in the news. So they tell the story misleadingly to make the government look good, to cover up wrongdoing, and to sensationalize things for the sake of ratings. Very prescient points by THE RUNNING MAN.

Schwarzenegger had already done PREDATOR, but it hadn’t come out yet when he filmed this. His character is pretty cool, but not that cool. He chews a cigar, busts out of prison, reluctantly helps a revolution. In prison he carries a pylon on his shoulder like he carried a log in COMMANDO. The script is by Steven E. De Souza, always trying to prove that DIE HARD was a fluke. This probaly has the worst one-liners of Schwarzenegger’s career until BATMAN AND ROBIN. In fact this movie specifically might be what they were making fun of with that “McBain” character on the Simpsons cartoon. I think every time he kills somebody he makes some terrible pun. I guess my favorite is when somebody asks what happened to the guy he just sawed in half, and he says, “He had to split.”

You know that dumb cliche where the hero faces down the villain and repeats back some line the villain said earlier, to show that the tables have turned? In this he says a whole series of lines. How did he remember all that? I didn’t even remember it and I experienced it in movie time. I doubt Killian remembers where it came from either, the irony has gotta be lost on him. That’s not cool.

It is cool that they got Richard Dawson to be in this, and that he does a good job. I’m surprised he was willing to play such a bastard. That’s gotta be a movie first to have a real game show host playing an asshole villain. I don’t know of another one until Bob Barker’s cameo in HAPPY MADISON.

It’s also great to see Jesse Ventura in here as Captain Freedom, a retired Stalker who wears a blue blazer like an NFL commentator. After Kimball kills all the other Stalkers Captain Freedom is forced out of retirement. But he objects – not because he doesn’t want to die, but because “ten years ago I used to kill guys like that with my bare hands” but now they got him wearing a mechanized arm. He talks about how it used to be a sport of honor. That might be the best thing in the movie: a killer nostalgic for the more honorable early days of the brutal dystopian murder-sport. Even when society is crushed by tyranny you can count on everything going further downhill.

At least that’s my favorite touch in the movie. Yours might be the part where Alonso claims the reason she still has a crucial digital video disc is because she hid it somewhere sensitive, i.e. her butt or her girl area. It’s supposed to be a throwaway joke but if you stop to consider the logistics it’s pretty ridiculous. If I ever watch this again I’m gonna be looking to see if she sits comfortably or not. I wonder if Alonso kept that in mind for all those scenes. You know, most movies are shot out of sequence, so the director probaly says “Okay Maria, in this scene you are being chased by Dynamo, and he’s trying to electrocute you. So I want you to come over here, here’s your mark, and you turn this way and you call out for Kimball. And don’t forget you have a floppy disc up your kooch. Okay, let’s go.”

With this type of satire in a sci-fi action movie you can’t help but think of Paul Verhoeven. But enjoyable as it is, this is no Verhoeven (who Schwarzenegger would work with three years later on TOTAL RECALL). It’s way better than ROBOCOP 3, but it has that same approach of having the heroes realize what a fucked up world they live in and fighting against it. Part of Verhoeven’s genius was presenting this horrible world and then pretending he thinks it’s okay. This one also doesn’t push violence the way Verhoeven does, or the way BATTLE ROYALE would years later with a similar premise. There’s one exploding head from far away. Apparently the producers made them cut other ones out.

Speaking of the producers (who include Rob “THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS” Cohen), I blame them for this movie not being great. Their job is to find somebody who can make it well in the alotted time and budget, but they failed to find that balance. They first hired a pre-ABOVE THE LAW Andrew Davis, but he went way overschedule shooting the jailbreak (surprise: best sequence in the movie) so they fired him. They started back up 2 days later with Mark Glaser, a TV (and BAND OF THE HAND) director who had previously turned down the movie because he thought there wasn’t enough time to prep. Not very experienced and now he’s finishing somebody else’s movie in worse circumstances than the ones he already thought were undoable. That explains why most of the action is pretty stiff or awkward (like the phony-looking fight in the helicopter at the beginning.)

So this is a low-rent version of a Verhoeven type movie, but you know, there aren’t enough movie of this type, so I’m willing to go easy on it. Not essential Schwarzenegger, but unique enough to be worth watching.

[ratings]

It’s a relief to see a Stephen King story where the main guy is not a writer and his marriage is not in trouble. This is the story of happily married doctor Louis Creed and his family of 2 kids and a cat moving to a new town in a house right along a popular trucking route. The road is so dangerous there’s a large pet sematary (sic) nearby, so they start worrying about their cat Winston Churchill. Their worries are not unfounded. But also they should keep an eye on their youngest kid in my opinion. (implied spoiler)

So you got pets and children getting run over, a real fun time at the movies, right? But wait, there’s more. The ghost of a guy the doctor tried to help has been warning him in his nightmares about how he should not do this one thing which, coincidentally his across-the-street neighbor (Herman Munster) shows him how to do: he buries his cat in a Native American burial ground so it will later come back to life.

The cat does come back (the very next day, they thought it was a goner, etc.), but now it’s mean and its eyes glow and it smells like shit. Not sure if it’s cat shit or regular shit but the point is Church smells terrible. Not a fitting tribute to the noted statesman and orator. This zombie cat situation is no good, but at least Dr. Louis didn’t have to admit to his daughter that her cat was dead. So it’s a mixed bag.

The real trouble comes when the kid dies, because obviously you know the mistake he’s gonna make. It’s a good concept because if this magic really existed of course you would have to try it. You know it’s gonna be a disaster to bring your kid back from the dead, but how can you not test it out? In fact, there’s a whole long sequence where Mr. Munster is leading Dr. Louis on a difficult hike to bury the cat, and he hasn’t explained why they’re leaving the pet sematary (sp). And it seems weird that the doctor wouldn’t question what’s going on. Especially considering that he has already had a dream where the ghost warned him about not doing this. So the conclusion I come to is that he understands what’s going on, and knows he shouldn’t do it, but the temptation is too strong, so he plays along. And I buy it.

I’m not sure the ghostly premonitions are necessary to the story, but the makeup on that guy is sure disturbing (his skin is dead white and his fatal headwound is still visible). But the creepiest part is the little kid, Gage. He comes back and mutilates poor Mr. Munster with a scalpel, but he’s still a baby. I know it’s not real, they use a dummy in some shots, but there are enough real shots and recordings of his playful laugh to creep me the fuck out.

If you give it too much thought some of it is kind of silly. For example, the pet sematary is a really cool set design, all pieced together out of weathered scrap wood, with a walkthrough entrance and the graves set up in impressive circles. But all of the signs are done in little kid handwriting. This thing was built by kids? Not credible. Kids wish they could build shit. But they can’t. They’re kids. I don’t care what you’ve seen on TV. If they could build they would build a fort, but they can’t, so they build nothing, especially not a sematary or grayvyarrd.

And by the way, what’s with this guy being okay with burying his cat in a beautiful Native American burial ground? Forget magic and curses, what kind of an asshole thinks it’s okay to bust open a huge carefully designed memorial from another culture and stick his daughter’s runover cat in it? NOT very culturally sensitive, in my opinion. And by the way, also not cool in a white man’s graveyard.

But those are little things, no dealbreakers as far as I’m concerned. It’s a well-executed movie and as my closing argument I will mention what I think is the most memorably horrifying scene: the (first) death of Gage. I think everybody can relate to the fear of a kid getting hurt. I know this because I don’t have kids but I get nervous just seeing other people’s kids goofing around next to roads or ledges. I see some toddler making a run for the street and calculate if the parent is gonna get there or if I should run out there and play Superman. So watching this scene there is alot of tension in the air seeing this little kid over on the grass here, the road right over there, the kite string gets away and rolls toward the street just as the parents are looking at the other kid, the toddler follows the string… in fact this scene has a perfect example of the kind of geography so lacking in modern movies. There’s an overhead shot that could almost be a map, showing the road and the field, the truck coming down the road, the kid running toward the road… oh shit, what an effective scene. Not pleasant.

Also I disagree with some of the spelling in this movie. But I liked it.

[ratings]

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CUJO is another solid Stephen King picture with a high concept about people with marital difficulties being terrorized, but for once it is not a haunted object that terrorizes them, it is a dog haunted only by a viral zoonotic neuroinvasive disease that causes acute encephalitis in mammals. Cujo got his rabies from a bat (the unsung villain of this piece, if you ask me) so now he’s kind of confused and taking his car chasing duties a little too serious. So when the mom from E.T. and the kid from “Who’s the Boss?” get stranded in their car on his property it creates a conflict. There is a strong disagreement about whether or not the dog should be allowed inside the car, basically.

Dee Wallace’s character is married to Daniel-Hugh Kelly, but having an affair with Christopher Stone (the man who put the Stone in Dee Wallace Stone). She just broke off the affair, but also her husband just found out about the affair, so both of the men are pissed at her right now. And the Pinto needs repairs, so she brings it out to the mechanic who owns Cujo and who, it turns out, is not available (i.e. dead). So the car breaks down in the driveway and there’s nobody to help.

Cujo is named after the leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army, played by Ving Rhames in PATTY HEARST. But the dog does not share those radical views. He just likes chasing rabbits and, sometimes, people. Like Bruce Wayne he stumbles across a bat cave and it changes his life forever. But instead of channeling the experience into good Cujo just gets slimy and bites some people to death.

The performances by the 3 leads – mom, kid, and dog – are all great. Wallace shows the pain she’s going through trying to repair the mistake she’s made, then the fear she’s going through under siege by a dog, and finally has a Sarah Connor/Ripley moment of maternal badassness when she decides enough is enough and fights Cujo with a baseball bat.

Danny Pintauro was apparently 6 years old, and I don’t know how the fuck you get a kid so young to be so convincing. He does alot of screaming and crying. Maybe they really let the dogs attack him. I don’t know, but it’s uncanny. I only noticed one line that seemed a little scripted, mostly he seems to bheave like a real kid. Also it’s creepy as hell when he has some kind of asthma attack or something and looks dead.

But the best performance is the dog. Saint Bernards are huge but they’re usually a dopey, friendly looking dog. This dog I believe wants to eat my face off. The rabies makeup looks very real, then they get him to grown and bark, jump on people, tear a car apart. I read that they put meat in the car and let the dog at it, but even knowing that it’s kind of horrifying to see a dog that big climbing on top of a car and trying to pry the windows off. They apparently used a mechanical head at some point in the movie, but not much. Almost all of it seems to be real dogs.

Peter Medak (or “another director” they say on the bonus materials of the DVD) started the movie but was replaced by Lewis Teague, who Stephen King suggested because he had directed ALLIGATOR. I didn’t know who he was and remembered this from the ’80s as being pretty straightforward and workmanlike filmatism. But watching it this time I was surprised how good the camerawork was. At times it brings you into the world of the dog, like in the opening when he chases the rabbit and gets his head stuck in the hole, you’re down there with him, his barks thundering through the chamber, pissing off the bats. Later there’s a scene where he’s getting sick and he’s just laying under the table as his owner is playing poker. The scene could be about the conversation they’re having, which is important to the plot, but the camera is down on the floor with the dog, so it’s more about how he feels. And of course there are plenty of Cujo POV shots when he’s stalking people or pouncing on them.

But the most impressive shot is when the little boy Tad is trying to turn off his light and get into bed. He’s afraid of monsters so he’s trying to flip the switch and jump in bed in one motion. We see it how he must see it: suddenly the room is huge, he’s running in slow motion and as he jumps the camera pulls up over him and flips upside down. I didn’t notice it on the credits, but the director of photography was Jan De Bont. I know most people think of him now as a director of crappy movies, but before that he was a brilliant cinematographer. And who is to say that shooting the claustrophobic spaces of DIE HARD wasn’t informed by him shooting this movie inside a Pinto five years earlier?

I think one thing I like about CUJO is the simplicity of it. There’s nothing fantastic about what happens. Maybe it’s an unlikely scenario but it’s definitely a possible one, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s a debate going on all the time in Seattle, and I’m sure many other places, about pitbulls. Several times a year or more somebody’s pet pitbull goes nuts and mauls some old lady or toddler to death. Usually the owners are surprised because this dog was perfectly well behaved and never hurt anybody before. Some people want to ban pitbulls as pets in the city and of course pitbull owners get pissed because their dogs so far have not freaked out and murdered somebody’s grandma in the most painful and horrifying way possible.

These dogs, aren’t evil, they’re fuckin dogs. They think they’re protecting themselves. The old lady’s purse is too shiny or something, who knows. Something sets them off, they think they gotta fight and they happen to possess some strong jaws. Just like a guy who happens to have a bunch of guns is gonna cause some damage when he thinks somebody’s breaking into his house. (But it’s really a grandma or toddler.)

So that’s kind of what’s scary about Cujo, he’s just a confused dog. He doesn’t really have malicious intent. But he could seriously fuck you up.

In conclusion, it should be illegal to own Cujo as a pet.

[ratings]

John Cusack plays a writer of haunted places guidebooks travelling around to allegedly haunted rooms, testing them, staying the night and writing about them. But he’s kind of a dick about it and doesn’t even believe in ghosts. And it’s indicated that something tragic happened in New York that caused him to leave his wife. But now he wants to go back to New York for the first time to stay in this room he found out about, 1408 at the Dolphin, where a whole bunch of people have killed themselves. And of course he gets in, the room terrorizes him for real, he learns about himself and explores the traumas of his life and faces why he left his wife. Spoooooky.

This is kind of off-topic here, but over the last year or so I have found myself in strong opposition to the sarcastic “really?” You know, let’s say someone is riding their bicycle on the sidewalk and they crash into you, and they say, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” You would turn your voice real snooty and seay “Really? You’re riding your bike on the sidewalk and you’re really gonna blame me for this?” That’s the sarcastic “really?”, and in that case it’s kind of justified. But more often than not the technique is being abused, used to feign incredulousness at things that aren’t that extreme. It’s overused. Some of my friends use it too much, John Stewart uses it too much, Saturday Night Live Weekend Update even has a whole segment based around it. Really? You’re really gonna do a whole segment called “Really?” I say quit it.

But if you were the type to use that there would be a whole lot of Stephen Kingy elements here to use it on. You would use it to turn your nose up at Cusack writing all these books even though he thinks they’re bullshit. At him having that one book he wrote so long ago that was personal and meaningful. At Samuel L. Jackson, as the manager of the hotel, being familiar with his complete bibliography and hassling him about what the early book says about his relationship with his father. About the hotel staff knowing the room is deadly but having it cleaned once a month. And especially about them letting this guy stay in the room just because his publisher threatens them with a lawsuit. Like they can’t just say it’s being repaired.

Plus you got the usual Stephen King shit: famous writer protagonist, marital troubles, alcohol, old pop song that keeps playing in a spooky context (in this case “It’s Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters – a good choice if you must drag out this old cliche). As part of my October viewing I also watched an episode of the King mini-series NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES. It’s the one called “Battleground” where William Hurt plays a hitman whose penthouse is invaded by haunted army men toys. At one point Hurt climbs out the window and carefully walks around the ledge, high above New York City. I thought “Hey! That same thing happened in CAT’S EYE!” Well, sure enough, same thing happens in 1408 too.

So, you know, there’s some silliness you have to swallow even aside from the Evil Hotel Room. But I think it’s a pretty decent movie anyway. For one thing, the construction of the story is pretty smart. First it sets up the character in his normal life, including a signing at Borders attended by 3 people, which seems pretty realistic for those types of books. He jokes around but you sense he’s unhappy, and in these scenes they drop a couple hints about things in his life that will come up later, and give him a near-death experience so you can wonder whether what we’re seeing is reality or hallucination.

Then it gets to setting up the horror, with special guest Samuel L. Jackson. He’s the hotel manager intent on talking this author out of staying in the room. In my Seagalogical and other action studies I always talk about the “Just How Badass Is He?” scenes where a military commander, a police captain or a villain hypes up the hero, listing his medals and training, what countries he’s fought in, maybe some story about some incredible thing he did in the past. He ripped off a guy’s leg, only survivor of a poorly timed volcano expedition, it’s like he’s a ghost etc. Well, this is the horror equivalaent of that, Sam Jackson doing the “Just How Evil Is It?” speech to hype up this room. Cusack’s heard it, he recites along with the stats about how many people killed themselves there. But Jackson starts telling him about the natural deaths too. And the sick details. Showing him photos. Telling about the precautions they have to take just to clean the room, and the tragedies that happen anyway. None of this fazes him so Jackson sums it all up succinctly: “It’s an evil fucking room.”

So by the time he walks in there you’re ready for some serious scares. It’s a great buildup. The movie does deliver, but maybe doesn’t live up entirely to the buildup. Lots of weird ghostly shit happens, and it stays pretty entertaining. But I think maybe part of the problem is from me connecting it to this action movie formula. We got this badass room and we got this guy trapped in a small area. What we don’t have is a strong physical goal for him to accomplish. In alot of these stories the hero would have to figure something out, a way to escape or something. There’s a little of that but soon you realize that the only thing he can do is wait it out. Try to sit around not dying for 12 hours and then it will be the next day. That’s cool and all but maybe recreating the feeling of insomnia is not the most exciting use for a movie. Ultimately he’s not passive, it’s through his own doing that the author vs. hotel room conflict ends, but it’s a pretty simple, not exactly clever thing he does all the sudden, so it’s not exactly John McClane material here.

But the other thing that helps the movie overcome its weaknesses is Cusack. He seems angry and tormented enough for you to believe the character but also he has a dark sense of humor that comes through sometimes and livens things up. One of my favorite parts is a little smartass comment he makes. He’s stuck in the room and (again, like a DIE HARD movie) tries climbing through a vent. But when he gets in there he starts seeing other parts of his life through the vents into the other rooms, and gets attacked by some freaky monsters and shit. He goes through this whole long ordeal, doesn’t make it anywhere and falls painfully through the vent back into the same evil room he was trying to escape from. And he says, “Well, it’s good to be back.”

1408 is a pretty solid mid-level Stephen King movie. It’s definitely no CARRIE or THE SHINING but it’s not a bad use of your time.

the dolphin, room 1408, NYC
Posted Oct 14, 08 by ghostauthor22, 1 reviews
with a budget, traveling for business

nice room but fucking evil

i stayed in room 1408 as research for a travel/supernatural oriented book. the room is very nice with pleasant wallpaper and furnishings. very roomy with plenty of light and a view of the city. staff is helpful although too scared to enter room. there was a problem with the thermostat but they fixed it. my only complaint is that the room is fucking evil, i kept seeing people jump out of windows, my dead daughter, was frozen, burned, the room was destroyed and repaired several times, i woke up from a near death experience outside of the room and later was back in the room, the police could not find me in the room, a weird zombie baby thing attacked me in the vent, i cut myself, got weird phone calls from the front desk trying to get me to commit suicide, an imposter called my wife on a webcam and told her to come when really i didn’t want her to, and i had to set the room on fire. also the mirrors don’t work properly and the items in the mini-fridge are extremely overpriced. i am somewhat of a travel writer though so i am picky, the layman would find room 1408 to be a charming and affordable place to stay while visiting the big apple.

[ratings]

There’s kind of a microcosm thing going on here. The story shows how people turn on each other due to fear. At first they band together and they trust the authority of the guys in uniform (strangely I’m talking about the guys with the Food House aprons, not the three uniformed soldiers who happen to be there). But as things get crazier tensions rise, they argue, they split into teams. Working class don’t trust college boys. Locals don’t trust out of town vacationers. Out-of-towners think locals are talking shit about them. The biggest split is religious when Marcia Gay Harden believes these are the end times, starts preaching, develops a flock.

This is a good movie but not a perfect one, and this religious part is the most not-perfect part. Leave it to the one Oscar winner in the cast to stink up the joint with overacting. I guess she’s subtle compared to Piper Laurie as Carrie White’s mother, but not by much. Luckily I expected worse based on the trailers so it didn’t ruin it for me. But I think this “crazy religious lady who thinks she’s a prophet” cliche should’ve been left in the book. It would be way scarier with some rewrites and re-acts so she’s not completely nuts, she’s not cruel or evil, she just has extreme religious views that endanger the people who don’t agree.

There are other bumps here and there – Jane goes from telling people not to go outside to wanting to go outside himself a little fast, his son has some corny dialogue, the feisty old lady using hairspray as a blowtorch is a little too much – but overall this is a solid, well told horror story. There’s nothing shockingly original about it, but there are many points when it avoids the obvious turns. For example, Jane and some other guys are in the back room when some tentacles reach in from outside. They try to tell the others about it but nobody believes them and at first they won’t even come back to look at the piece of tentacle Jane hacked off with a fire axe. When they finally convince somebody to go back there it could be an “I swear, it was right here!” moment but instead the tentacle is right where they left it and they even poke it with a stick and make it wiggle. Yep, it’s a tentacle.

The craziness of the Mist escalates and the people witness various strange and scary creatures. Giant bugs may or may not be involved. The creatures are well designed and look pretty real. There are some good scares and few cheap ones.

This is a great setup for a Romero style horror movie – a good location, lots of character tension, good monsters and a device to keep them out of sight and mysterious. It’s rare these days that a movie takes a good, simple premise like that and follows through with it, but this one does. And they have a secret weapon in Tom Jane. He is the protective father, the take charge hero, the nice guy talking common sense, the macho guy ready to take a risk, all wrapped up in one guy. Director Frank Darabont (co-writer of ELM STREET 3) said he wanted to give Jane a role that really took advantage of his talents. I guess he must not know about STANDER. But this is a good role for Jane.

Although the theme of how fear divides people obviously applies well to post 9-11 type America, this movie feels timeless. There’s nothing tying it to modern pop culture or current film trends. Except for the digital effects it almost could’ve been made any time from the ’70s until now. In fact it’s so old school that on the DVD Darabont includes a black-and-white version of the movie – I’ll have to try that out next time I watch it.

“The ending” seems to be controversial partly because it’s different from the book. I can see the complaints, there are other directions it could go which could be interesting. But man, the way it ends is such a punch in the balls I had to kind of admire it. You like Tom Jane and wish things could work out for him, but it looks bad for him. Then his fate turns out worse than you could have guessed. Film buffs usually have a kneejerk reaction against happy endings (for example I can’t talk about Spielberg’s WAR OF THE WORLDS without somebody saying the whole movie is worthless because the son survived at the end). It’s funny for once to see people mad because an ending is too darked and fucked up. You don’t get that too often.

In the Stephen King movie hierarchy, well, this is not a masterpiece like CARRIE or THE SHINING. But it’s on the tier just beneath those, the good solid movies destined to maybe be a little underrated and forgotten but definitely be pulled out every couple of years and enjoyed.

[ratings]

Walken of course is real good. He’s such a weirdo, but he gets to joke around, be kind of a charmer, and also be pissed off at this turn of events that people tell him is a “gift” even though it’s ruined his life. Cronenberg plays up the tragic love story. Walken and his old girlfriend still love each other, but while he was in the coma she got married and had a kid. So it’s tough. Not much you can do there that’s gonna make you happy in the long run.

It’s definitely up there with the better Stephen King movies, but I gotta say it’s no CARRIE. Both have these events you never forget, but no matter how many times I watch CARRIE it still gets me in the gut because you know exactly the horrible thing that’s gonna happen and De Palma wrings every drop of tension he can from it, taking his sweet time, making you waaaaaaaaaaaaait for it. Very. Very. Slowly. As good as Cronenberg is he’s not that masterful with DEAD ZONE. It’s a cool idea – he sees a vision of a senatorial candidate starting WWIII and decides he has to assassinate him – but it happens pretty quick and then it’s over with. You kind of expect it to be drawn out more.

The weird thing about the movie that I didn’t remember is there are two crazy things that happen that I just can’t buy in this somewhat down-to-earth story. I’m not talking about the part where a guy commits suicide by propping up a pair of scissors and lowering his mouth onto it. That’s how you know it’s a Cronenberg movie, but it works perfectly well in context. There were a couple other things that were too much though.

In a “normal” Cronenberg movie people can do bizarre things (like fuck a leg wound) and it makes sense in his reality. But this one’s closer to the regular, non-wound-fucking world we live in every day so I gotta call bullshit on a couple of the characters’ actions. First of all, in the WWIII vision Martin Sheen (playing his same character from THE WEST WING and SPAWN) needs the vice president to put his palm on a scanner to launch the missiles. The VP refuses until Sheen says he’s gonna do it if it takes cutting off his hand. Now, obviously our real VP right now would not only put his palm down, he’d use the tip of his erect penis to enter the launch codes. But this isn’t Cheny, this is depicted as a normal human being who knows it is madness. And I can’t believe he would give in under any circumstances, and especially just from verbal threats. At least let them get the machete out and take a practice swing before you give in. Instead his attitude is like “Well, okay fellas, if YOU want to start a nuclear war then I’ll go along with it, but remember that I disagreed.”

The more laughable one is the climax, so obviously this is a BIG FUCKIN SPOILER. It happens when Walken tries to shoot Sheen at a campaign event. His ex sees him taking aim and calls his name, distracting him enough that he misses the first shot. Sheen’s reaction is to run over, grab the ex’s baby and hold him up like in THE LION KING or when Michael Jackson was out on that balcony. You know, the ol’ baby-shield trick. Sure, you’d shoot me. But would you shoot this adorable baby?

My friends, I do not have the power to convey how hilarious it is to see Martin Sheen frantically pick up a baby and hold it in front of his face as a bullet shield. It’s NICOLAS CAGE WICKER MAN crazy so it takes what has been a sophisticated thriller down a notch. But at the same time it’s something I haven’t seen before. So it’s the magic that movies are made of.

[ratings]

Actually, it’s a better movie than I remember it being when I saw it back in the ’80s, and I’m going to give most of the credit to Mr. John Carpenter. I’m not saying this is HALLOWEEN or THEY LIVE but it’s a good straightforward haunted car movie. The movie stars Keith Gordon (the kid from HOME MOVIES and DRESSED TO KILL) as a nerdy kid whose jock buddy tells him he needs to get laid now that he’s a senior and who gets his ass kicked in metal shop. They stab his sack lunch to death with a switchblade and he suffers the humiliation of everybody seeing that his mom packed him yogurt.

So what he does, he finds this old piece of shit car that he buys from a crazy old coot in a shack (Roberts Blossom, who was fucking brilliant in DERANGED). The old man doesn’t tell him that his brother just died in the car but he does tell him it’s named Christine. And that’s what the kid always calls it, “Christine,” not “my car.” And everybody acts like that’s normal, for some reason.

His parents don’t approve of the car so he gets a space in a garage inside a junkyard and starts fixing Christine up. This was before the invention of Pimp My Ride, so he puts the elbow grease in himself and he gets the job done. As he does it he becomes less nerdy, more manly, wears darker clothes, slicks his hair back, even starts wearing his collar up like he thinks he’s in the ’50s. Suddenly he has a girlfriend and he has the balls to call his dad “motherfucker” but nobody can really stand him because he’s obsessed with the fucking car. I mean Christine.

But worse than that though, the car is going around running people over, causing people to choke and shit like that. The car is jealous of the girlfriend. Christine goes after anybody that wants to harm her man, but you don’t really know if he’s inside there or if the car is going out on joyrides by itself. Like if Knight Rider came back messed up after the war and went on a killing spree. And the kid gets crazier too. I think this is the only movie where a guy gets possessed by a car. Also there’s a scene at the end where a bulldozer sodomizes the car. John Carpenter even says so on the commentary track. I think that is a historic cinematic first and last.

Somehow it’s actually kind of creepy that after he gives her life, Christine can repair herself. She gets totally destroyed several times and then fixes herself. There’s even a scene where she’s driving around on fire and it’s a pretty amazing image. When she gets totalled, she repairs herself. They did this by crushing the car with hydraulics and then running the film backwards. I guarantee you they’d do this now with computers, but this is so much better because you know it’s real metal, it’s a real car. It’s great.

There’s some silly crap in here, I mean aside from the haunted car business. Like Harry Dean Stanton is a cop investigating the murders, and he suspects Keith Gordon. But he asks him questions like “how did you get the parts to repair the car? How did you get this color of paint that they don’t make anymore? Do you have the receipts?” Like he knows it’s a magic car and he’s trying to get him to admit it. Come on cop, you can’t prove it’s a magic car, just lay off.

The depiction of high school is not all that realistic, but it’s kind of like DePalma did in CARRIE, and maybe this is a compliment to Stephen King’s story too: it kind of puts adults in a teenage perspective while watching the movie. Everything is heightened. The guy that picks on Keith Gordon is this muscular giant with huge sideburns. He looks like John Travolta mixed with He-Man. And I think when you’re that age, that’s exactly what the older kids in school look like to you. John Travolta mixed with He-Man.

But what’s best about this movie is the way it shows men’s obsession with cars. Getting a car is how this kid becomes cool, how he becomes a man, how he gets a girlfriend. It’s how he becomes independent from his parents. When the bullies want to get him back, they don’t beat him up, they beat up his car. He leaves his girlfriend for his car. He fondles his car like it’s his girlfriend. The car is the most important thing to him, he and his car become one.

One word of caution, this movie has the song “Bad to the Bone” on the opening credits. I used to be pretty sure that was one of the worst songs ever made. But watching this now, I realized that I was wrong. See, for this movie it works, the words fit, the attitude fits. For this movie, it almost seems like a respectable white rock guy doing a blues song. This was before it was in every other bad movie as a way to say that a guy is tough or, you know, bad to the bone. Or in every movie about a dog. Because get it, dogs eat bones, at least in cartoons. So I realized it’s not really the song’s fault. It’s the way the song has been abused. It’s like the flag. You see the flag on enough ads and pickup trucks and lapels, you start to think you don’t like the flag. But actually you just don’t like these assholes who think they own the flag. The flag itself is fine, and what it stands for to you is great. Those guys are just using it wrong. “Bad to the Bone” is the same way, it’s okay in this movie. Not to say it’s as good as the flag though. I am NOT dissing Betsy Ross, she did a great job. I’m just saying don’t worry, it’s not that bad in this movie. But you can put it on mute if you got a problem with it. thanks.

[ratings]