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Gothor (9)
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Just want to say, excellent posts. I too am slowly tracking down the various "Parker" movies, working my way back from Payback, which it seems I enjoyed a great deal more than Quentin Tarantino. :D
I think he meant Frank, but the line is intentionally vague enough to leave room for a sequel. Heck, knowing horror movies, a sequel could happen with <SPOILER>The Mother. (It "worked" for Rob Zombie's Halloween II)</SPOILER>.
> There would be no movie if Archer explained in the USB who Morgan is, and how dangerous he is.
It probably *is* a bad idea to leave the explanation in some video on a USB. So I kind of get that. It makes a bit of sense.
But! All he had to do was lead enough clues to get her to the dungeon, and *that's* when you explain the situation. It could have been another USB drive, it could have been a VHS tape, hell it could have been a post-it note. Just make sure that once she's in there, she understands the situation.
"Or else there is no movie" should have been the tagline.
> The only flaw is that I wasn’t so hot about the ending. What was the deal about how Olga’s uncle saw the deceased sister-in-law at the end? The sister-in-law couldn’t possibly be alive, and why would the Olga’s uncle hallucinate her: he had no mental issues. So what the heck was that ending about?
Seems to be confirming the supernatural. Either that, or he's bleeding out and seeing things due to a guilty conscience. Heck, maybe he's already dead and witnessing some apparition come to drag him off to hell.
> What exactly is next for Olga and Isaac? She’s still tied up with that chain and vest: is he going to free her, or is he going to call someone (police) to go and free her?
I believe him when he says he's going to call for help. Whether or not she shoots him is the real question. The filmmaker left it up to the viewer to decide, which does make things unsettling. Personally, I'd like to think he makes it. If she kills him, she's as good as dead herself, stranded on that island.
What bothered me the ending(s) was that they were basically going for two things: one, that Cusack was trapped in a Groundhogs Day hell until he committed suicide ('express checkout'); two, that he had to sacrifice himself before his wife was lured into 1408.
I think the movie would have been much stronger if they had only stuck to one of those ideas.
For one, while being trapped in an endlessly repeating hour of torment sounds scary, it sort of deflates the tension from the end of the movie. Like, the whole time there's this ticking countdown until his hour is up and he'll be dead. Then it counts to zero and just... rolls back over? Talk about anti-climactic. Sure, facing endless torment is a scary concept, but the way it's portrayed is a moment of low tension, almost a relief -- like when someone in a Groundhog Day time loop dies horribly and wakes up up safe in their bed. At a point in the film that should have been super grim, Cusack looked fine, the hotel looked fine. Everything looked fine!
In the story, the world opened into another dimension, revealing the true nature of the room, as this hungry entity bathed in yellow light, speaking in an electric buzzing, slowly approached him. He was going to be consumed by this hungry malevolent *thing*. That felt like a truly dire moment, where he had seconds to react (and light himself on fire).
Here it's like, well... time for another hour of this?
It's like they knew that was a problem, so they added on top of the time loop the ticking timer element of his wife approaching 1408. That in itself could have been a good ending, showing Cusack changing from a man who leaves his wife after the death of their child without so much as an explanation (she doesn't even know if they were separated on the webcam call), to a man who'd burn himself alive to protect his wife. But that idea is undercut by the Groundhog Day element. He's not JUST sacrificing himself to save his wife, he's sacrificing himself to save his wife AND escape eternal torment. The two ideas occupy so much space it's hard to give either room to breathe.
Sometimes less is more, and if they had just gone with one or the other, it'd have worked a lot better for me.
> When he is in Room 1408, he has a bag which contains a (now old) cell phone, a laptop with webcam, a flashlight and a knife. Wheres his "ghost hunting" equipment, and why does he use a tape recorder if he has expensive cameras?
I think you're right, those are just props for his readers. He doesn't believe in the paranormal, so he has no reason to take the items with him. You would think he'd take pictures of the rooms (Sam Jackson even offers to let him take photos of an identical room next door), but it could be his 10 Haunted Hotels series don't feature in-room pictures, for whatever reason.
> The hotel manager said electronics don't work in the room, but everything worked fine except when the laptop got wet.
His tape recorder playback is also distorted, even before the fire. When he's sort of leaning against the wall, drunken, playing back his notes, it definitely sounds weird. But in the Theatrical ending, when Cusack plays back the tape of his daughter, the voices are no longer distorted. This might mean the distortion only happens while in the room.
> One scene from 1408 that always creeped me out and I never forgot is when he sees the shadowed person across the street in another building and calls for help
The window across the street and the Carpenters song ("We've only just begun...") were both great additions to the original story. :)
I have a couple of theories about that!
One, Solarbabies is *weird*. It's got a lot of odd worldbuilding for audiences to take in. When studios get nervous about alienating their audience, they often pack in an opening narration, even when it's not something the writer or director ever had in mind. I believe this happened with Bladerunner as well. It's pretty common, especially in scifi movies. Perhaps Charles Durning's character wasn't originally considered important enough to do the opening narration, but for whatever reason the studio went with him. (He's a respected, older actor, so he's pretty studio friendly compared to say, Lukas Hass doing it.)
Another theory is this movie seems super edited down. Scenes just come to an abrupt stop, there are time jumps, etc. It's possible an original edit of the film was longer, with more scenes for The Warden.
The last possibility I can think of is, once they leave the prison there's just not much for The Warden to do, especially since they never go back. I would have liked him to ride along with the Strictor, perhaps arguing about their methods of tracking down the runaways and such, but that's not how it played out.
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