This movie was definitely one I was anxiously anticipating. I’d seen the trailers, knew John Cusack was the star, was aware of it being based on a Stephen King story (that I haven’t read) and was getting psyched to see it. First, can I state how refreshing it is to see a horror movie that is more American retro-thriller than the current trends in tired Asian remakes and (admittedly cool) British doomsday epics? Second, it’s nice to see it isn’t a snuff/torture pic, which is becoming a major fad these days, thanks to hack director Eli Roth (enter into evidence the trailer for Captivity that played before 1408). I feel I need to occasionally add a disclaimer about my reviewing horror films, which is the fact that they just don’t work on me on a basic horror level. I’m way too low key. Jump scenes don’t work on me. Torture scenes don’t freak me out. The ones I find most effective are character driven, clever or otherwise entertaining. This stylish flick is enormously entertaining. It kept a little smirk on my face from start to finish. Frankly, that’s one of my favorite personal reactions to watching a movie. I totally loved watching this film.

Writing: As I said, I haven’t read the Stephen King source material, so I can make no comparisons as to how close the story is to that foundation. As such, making wild claims about the movie is difficult. Still, I think it may just be my favorite Stephen King film adaptation, of the horror style genre, anyway - precluding his “prison movies” (Shawshank, Green Mile) or dramas (Hearts in Atlantis, etc). I’m kinda strange in the fact that I dislike most of the popular film adaptations of his material (The Shining, etc). I do like Needful Things, Pet Cemetery and Night Flier. I think his stuff works much better in either mini-series form (Almost too many to list these days) or TV movie/series form. I prefer The Dead Zone TV series to the movie (in a major way). All that is to say that this is one of those rare examples of me really loving a theatrical film based on his material.

Production: There’s tons of cool production set pieces in this film. From the slick cinematography to the clever sets and sound design, it all just pops off the screen. For a movie that is heavily a one set movie, it really knows how to morph and change. The editing is very slick. Actually, it’s darn impressive how much they squeeze in to the 94 minute running time, without at all feeling rushed. By the way, this is one of the first releases I’ve noticed to come out of all the final deals that The Weinstein Company (who produced this film) made over the last few years. It’s produced under the Dimension Films banner (which left Disney/Miramax with them, and is now part of TWC) and distributed by MGM (who’s recent production/distribution changes have finally started to settle down after being bought primarily by Sony). One almost needs a flow chart to figure it all out. This film was directed by Mikael Håfström, who interestingly directed Derailed, which I think was the first film released by the new Weinstein Company studio.

Cast: This is John Cusack’s movie, plain and simple. Any other cast member has but a small, supporting role. That isn’t to say that the supporting actors don’t do a great job, because they do. Cusack, however, is 95% of the performance in the film, much of the time by himself. His casting is pitch-perfect. He brings his typically wry sense of cynical irony to the role, always slightly amused by things - even when he’s having a horror-induced nervous breakdown. Not many actors can pull off such a mix, but he can do it with ease. Despite his overly-high billing, Sam Jackson actually isn’t in much of the film, but what he is in is quite good. Mary McCormack is excellent playing the wife of Cusack’s character. Heck, even the always great Tony Shalhoub gets in one scene as a hectic publishing editor.

Music: So, you wanna know what it’s like in the head of a film score geek? Like many other aspects of film production, my mind is typically analyzing the music score of a film while I’m watching, if I mean to or not. Often times, it’s on a subconscious level, where I’m picking up on bits and pieces of other music scores. I mean, after watching enough movies, reading enough technical trade magazines (Cinefex & American Cinematographer being two of my standard reading materials) and watching countless documentaries and featurettes, it’s impossible to not be aware of what visual effect process is being used, or what cinematography tricks and styles are being utilized. Well, the music scoring process is where my mind really churns away. The way most movies are made today, they are first edited together with a “temp track,” where previous films score cues are used to realize the way the director wants scenes to work. It’s a doubled edged sword, however, in the fact that many times the final film score has what I like to call “temp track leaks,” where a film score fan can tell what original temp track cue was used because the composer ended up either choosing to or being force to copy that temp cue too closely. Well, composer Gabriel Yared actually did a marvelous job at composing a score of rather wide range and style for this film without feeling too on the nose in copying previous source material. I really liked the score a lot. I couldn’t pick out source material exactly, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out there was some Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, or other legends of the business that had music used as temp cues. I say all that to state that there was, however, one tiny bit of electronic texture used in some of the score that I knew I recognized, but just couldn’t put my finger on. I knew I was very familiar with the source material - the answer was on the tip of my tongue. So, I drove all the way home struggling to think of what it was. It wasn’t until I got home and slowly started circling my racks of film score CDs that I was finally able to nail it down. I walked around the stacks first narrowing it down by composer, until finally, “Ah ha! It’s gotta be Graeme Revell!” Then, scan along his section of my CDs, “There we go! It’s from Red Planet!” Such a relief finally figuring that out. It’s a great CD that I’ve listened to quite often over the years, and I ended up being slightly annoyed that it took me that long to come up with the answer. Anyway, such is the life of a film score geek…

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