A Pair of Kings for Openers
'1408' checks out early, but 'Black Sheep' is shear fun
By Andy Klein
With a couple dozen features, several miniseries, and innumerable shorts to date, adaptations of Stephen King stories and novels have become their own subgenre. They have their own set of conventions, beyond involving (90 percent of the time) horror and/or the supernatural. 1408, the new thriller from transplanted Swedish director Mikael Håfström, is no exception.
As in The Shining, Misery, Secret Window, and several others, the protagonist here is a writer. Mike Enslin (John Cusack) makes a nice living churning out books debunking the paranormal. He once aspired to something a little more significant - there are occasional glimpses of his first novel, the cover of which suggests a nauseatingly "sensitive" story about surfers. But the spook books sell, and Mike has a wife and child to support.
Or, at least, he used to. His marriage to Lily (Mary McCormack) has fallen apart after the death of daughter Katie (Jasmine Jessica Anthony), whose Keane-eyed frailty was no match for Nameless Movie Disease. Mike has abandoned his New York home for the Southern California haunts of his surfer days.
But he has to return to New York to prepare the crowning chapter of his upcoming Ten Nights in Haunted Hotel Rooms. He has stumbled across the legend of Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in Manhattan, home (he is told) to 56 mysterious deaths. For some years, the management has kept the room cleaned and maintained while refusing to allow anyone to stay there. Using the most spurious legal argument this side of the "unlawful enemy combatant" concept, Mike's publisher (Tony Shalhoub, on screen for exactly one scene) forces the hotel to let Mike have 1408 for one night.
Samuel L. Jackson shows up briefly as the hotel's manager, who does everything he can to dissuade Mike, allowing him to utter the latest variation of the Obligatory Samuel L. Jackson Line: "It's an evil fucking room."
Mike moves into 1408 with his computer and a bunch of scientific monitors for figuring out what non-supernatural forces are behind any unusual occurrences, but his tools all come to naught, of course, since otherwise there would be no movie. You can pretty much guess the sort of stuff that starts to happen, and, in this kind of movie, it's the cleverness of the execution that really makes the difference.
Having directed thrillers (among other genres) in Sweden, Håfström made his name in the U.S. with the Oscar-nominated Evil, which, despite its genre-esque title, was an essentially realistic story about troubled youth in a boarding school. His first English-language production, Derailed (with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen), went largely unnoticed.
For its first half, 1408 is genuinely scary, filled with off-kilter framings, images glimpsed only briefly, and continual hints that Mike's ordeals are linked to his former traumas. It seems pretty clear that the supernatural goings-on are for real, but there is always the possibility that they are projections of Mike's subconscious. Perhaps more to the point, they are the sorts of scares that we can relate to. If you're primed with ghost stories, put in an alleged haunted room, and left alone, random sounds will turn ominous, and shifting shadows take on threatening forms.
But there's a certain point about halfway in when the setting moves from a believable universe to a wholly unrecognizable one and our ability to connect emotionally with what we're seeing is weakened. Håfström's technique moves away from Polanski's The Tenant and closer to Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. Factoring in the now-standard multiple-fake-ending structure, the second half ranks as substantially less satisfying.
This week's other horror film is both more modest in budget and more entertaining. Jonathan King's Black Sheep comes from New Zealand and fits nicely in the tradition of Dead Alive, Peter Jackson's first small hit in the U.S. (Jackson's WETA provided the special effects for King's film.) Sheep probably rank only second to the kiwi among the world's associations with New Zealand, and King gleefully takes this national icon and turns it into a vehicle for comic terror.
The Oldfield sheep farm has thrived for generations, but the latest crop of Oldfields seems to have genetically apportioned all the "good" traits to sensitive Henry (Nathan Meister) and all the "evil" to his crass older brother, Angus (Peter Feeney), presumably the titular black sheep.
During their childhood, Angus's sadism so traumatized Henry that the latter - a victim of ovinophobia - has long since lived abroad, far away from the sheep that terrify him. But Henry has to briefly return to the farm to sell his share to Angus, who is about to conquer the industry with his new, genetically engineered supersheep.
Unfortunately, Angus is unaware of a few bugs still to be worked out. Worse yet, Grant (Oliver Driver), an imbecilic animal rights activist, has just stolen a sealed jar of lab refuse, which he promptly breaks, releasing a tiny fanged mutant embryo (which looks like Shari Lewis's hand puppet Lambchop on a really bad day). Apparently, this toothy tot can infect humans with his altered DNA by biting, and soon Grant is turning woolly and hooved.
Grant's partner in crime - the far brighter, more rational Experience (Danielle Mason) - teams up with Henry to try to escape from the rebellious supersheep, as well as the zombie-like humans they've bitten.
It's hard to convey just how droll all of this is. For his first feature, the director has started with a simple joke - the incongruity of sheep being threatening - and embellished it wittily enough to keep us chuckling throughout. As in Dead Alive, there are plenty of gross splatter effects here, but they're mostly the sort likelier to make you go "Ewwww!" rather than to actually throw up. (One particularly "ewwww" moment is very similar to a bit in Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse.)
Black Sheep does manage to generate some suspense in the midst of its general silliness, though not as successfully as Shaun of the Dead, which remains the current gold standard of the genre. The performances are all good, and it would be inexcusable not to mention the nameless Australian Shepherd's convincingly heroic turn.
Published: 06/21/2007
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