In 2007, it was nice to see a Stephen King adaptation at an actual movie theater again, where they belong, instead of the watered-down, overlong miniseries that played several nights on network TV and basic cable. It was also nice to see it contain actual scares, surviving the transition from its source material intact.

1408 comes from King’s 1992 short-story collection, Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. As King notes in his introduction, it was never meant to be an actual story, but an example of how writing progresses from draft to draft. For whatever reason, he finished it, and it’s one of Eventual’s many highlights. It’s easy to see why it was handpicked for big-screen treatment, and its modest success — combined with Frank Darabont’s The Mist later that year — helped usher in another wave of quality King films still going semi-strong more than a decade later.

John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a writer of several midlist books on haunted places. He’s working on one for hotels, rating each on a scare scale of one to 10 skulls. In his research, he’s found that supposed ghost-infested bed-and-breakfasts are just a way to drum up business. That will all change with his stay in room 1408 at New York’s Dolphin Hotel — a room perennially kept unoccupied for a reason: 56 occupants have died in it, none lasting for more than an hour.

Or, as the Dolphin manager (Samuel L. Jackson) puts it, the room is “fucking evil.”

Once inside, Mike’s stay starts off innocently enough: unexplained mints on the pillow, blared Karen Carpenter from the clock radio. But soon, actual bodily harm comes to him, and the clock starts providing a handy 60-minute countdown toward his apparent doom. With a barrage of spirits and phenomena and other things that go bump in the dark, it’s like The Shining compressed into one compact suite.

While King’s original story of the same name is structured roughly into thirds — before, during and after Mike’s stay — most all of the film is concerned with the during. Granting the tale an ominous touch, King relates the goings-on in the room not as they happen, but only afterward, via whatever details Mike left on his voice recorder.

What he doesn’t say makes our imagination run wild. But movies being visual, 1408 shows all, and some of it is very creepy. With the film more or less being confined to one space, Mikael Håfström does a great job of concocting more and more things to make Mike’s night a living hell. Although it includes all of the shocks of the story, it has to expand upon it in order to hit feature-length, adding a subplot about Mike’s ex-wife (Deep Impact’s Mary McCormack) and dead daughter to help fulfill that.

Hope you like Cusack, because the entire movie is on his shoulders. If he weren’t such a talented actor, we’d want to check out of 1408 early. But he makes the skeptic Mike likable, believable and sympathetic. As much as the moviegoer in us likes to see him go through the ringer, we feel bad for him all the same. In fact, parts of the film are real downers, but that just means it works.

The movie’s not perfect, mostly because of maybe two too many false endings. But it’s a smart and stylish chiller/thriller — everything that Håfström’s previous film, Derailed, was not. —Rod Lott

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With Beneath Us, the genius lie entirely in the pun of the title. First-time feature director Max Pachman’s slice of immigrationsploitation leaves subtlety out of the picture, despite the resonance and seriousness of its premise.

Four undocumented workers — including brothers Alejandro and Memo — are hired by the über-wealthy, über-voluptuous Mrs. Rhodes (Lynn Collins, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to finish construction on a guest home at a bargain-basement price. The property she shares with her husband (James Tupper, 2017’s Totem) is well-fortified, cut off from the rest of the world and all its promise with an electric fence. Forced to work day and night with no rest until the job is done, the workers too slowly realize they’re not going to be allowed to leave alive, what with the underground cavern of hired hands past.

To call the bosses are “racist” is to undersell their cruelty, which is hardly a one-off; Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes are essentially serial killers with the highest credit limit possible on a Home Depot credit card. The longer the job takes, the crazier Mrs. Rhodes gets, which is both the film’s greatest asset and liability. From the first scene, Pachman takes care to set up the troubled family dynamics of Alejandro (Rigo Sanchez, TV’s Animal Kingdom) and Memo (Josue Aguirre, Incarnate), then play them out … until he allows Tupper and especially Collins to approach their parts from rail No. 3.

Make no mistake: Collins is enormous fun in an utterly unhinged performance, but her Karen-to-the-nth-degree antics distract from the movie’s message even more than her push-up bra. It’s difficult to make politics stick in horror when your antagonist vamps and tramps her way through what amounts to a Tex-Mex Avery cartoon. —Rod Lott

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Setting a horror film inside an escape-room attraction is such a good idea, multiple movies have done it, including the 2019 theatrical hit Escape Room. Generically enough, two films from 2017 are simply titled Escape Room, too.

This is one of those — the one starring former Scream king Skeet Ulrich.

As Brice, Ulrich is the owner of the escape room Deranged, the logo of which adorns his ever-present black hoodie. With attendance having significantly cooled since the previous Halloween, Brice is desperate to get Deranged some new buzz to bring in the kids. Instead of offering free beer, booking a band, incorporating strippers or pursuing any valid idea, he goes browsing for antiques. At his first stop, he immediately gets worked up over a skull box behind the counter, but the shop owner (Sean Young, 1984’s Dune) says it’s not for sale, because it’s one of the world’s most cursed objects, what with housing a demon and all.

One stolen skull box later, Deranged welcomes new customers in Cutout Bin Brad Pitt (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment) and Junior Varsity Danny Masterson (Matt McVay, TV’s Lovecraft Country) as a pair of total horror bros. The boys have brought their less-enthused girlfriends (Hometown Killer’s Ashley Gallegos and Animal Among Us’ Christine Donlon) who, in real life, would not only be attending Wine Wednesdays, but would be with other guys.

As they try to uncover clues to unlock the door within 60 minutes, Brice watches from the comfort of his office, pumping his fists whenever they jump in response to a chintzy scare effect, as if to say, “Crushing it, dude!” Chained to the wall of the escape room is a sack-headed employee our foursome christens with the franchise-ready name “Stitchface” (Taylor Piedmonte, Mimesis). Unbeknownst to them, Stitchface has been possessed by the demon from the skull box; this only becomes apparent when he starts stabbing them to death while they attempt to solve puzzles. As Billy Joel put it, one-two-three-four-PRESH-SHURE!

How’s that for a premise? If you answered “about two levels beyond what I’m willing to believe,” you clearly stole my notes. For his first feature, writer/director Peter Dukes demonstrates skill in keeping the disposable cast’s hourlong challenge to more or less just that. Dukes’ decision may be strategic to stretch the running time, as the ridiculously needless Middle East prologue certainly suggests. Either way, that doesn’t make the movie interesting; watching the customers think aloud in real time about shapes and colors amounts to a taxing sit. The effect is like watching someone play a video game, in that at least someone appears to be having fun — it just isn’t you. —Rod Lott

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I’m very much a lover of Werner Herzog’s works, having seen most of his collaborations with Klaus Kinski except, oddly enough, Nosferatu the Vampyre. Though it’s highly acclaimed and critically loved the world over, I instead watched the lackluster sexual improprieties of the pseudo-sequel, Nosferatu in Venice, where the famed monster (still played by Kinski) goes on an Italian adventure! Pass the marinara, paisans!

Or not. Employing five different directors — including Starcrash’s Luigi Cozzi and Kinski himself — instead we’re left with a mostly drab and melancholy journey through the stench-filled canals of Venice, with grandstanding actors like Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasence taking on questionable roles in their battle to not only take on evil at its root, but apparently stave off real-life hunger in the lean ’80s.

As an obvious Van Helsing knock-off, Plummer comes to a Venetian house filled with statuesque young women, square-jawed young men, wholly off-putting crones and, of course, Pleasence as a hungry priest who seems to have been paid in craft services. Somehow, they resurrect Nosferatu (Kinski), now with a bitchin’ haircut the ladies seem to lust after.

Apparently, the only way to destroy the suave creature is for him to fall in love with a virgin, which, if I might be blunt, is pretty stupid. Still, with large holes blasted in his chest by the cowardly lot of supposed heroes as they run, the film comes to an ending I’m sure is supposed to be meaningful, but honestly seems more like a quick shot of Kinski on the way to his plane as villagers go pheasant hunting.

Final writing and directing credit was dropped in the lap of Augusto Caminito, who I guess did the best job he could with the big ball of film stock he was handed. Still, the ultimate shocker of this horror flick is the music by Vangelis that, while it don’t class up the movie, at least attempts a sheen of sorts almost comparable to Chariots of Fire. Almost. —Louis Fowler

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Beginning in the mid-’80s, I’ve been attracted to steamy, sultry redheads, with lusty firecracker Tawny Kitaen constantly on cable television. From hair-metal videos by Whitesnake to raunchy flicks like Bachelor Party, that crooked smile and ample, um, talent made her this young person’s dream girl — or one of them.

But when my parents brought home Witchboard — then a new release! — that crush reached its youthful erectile zenith. And while I find the horror flick to be somewhat boring today, I can honestly admit that Kitaen, though not in the movie as much as I remembered, is still a welcoming presence, David Coverdale’s penis be damned.

Linda (Kitaen) is throwing a party and her boyfriend, Jim (Todd Allen), decides to get wasted and be the world’s worst significant other — at least that’s what I’ve been told from my own mirroring actions. When a partygoer whips out his Ouija to contact the small child he’s been talking to — already weird if you ask me — strange things begin happening, like building sites caving in, metal barrels collapsing and masked men with axes splitting dudes right in the skull.

While the sight of a possessed Kitaen clad in a men’s suit and mimicking a middle-age male voice is both tantalizing and worrisome for a variety of reasons I should probably see someone about, the mostly boring film does offer three explosive finales I didn’t see coming. So thanks for that, director Kevin Tenney: I liked the wedding one best!

Two years later, Tenney directed Night of the Demons. I only saw it recently, because when it came out, my mother forbid me to rent it, because in her words, watching it would “invite the devil in the house.” —Louis Fowler

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