Cell (2016)

Tagline: When everyone is connected no one is safe

Cusack plays: Comic Book Artist Clay Riddell

Technically, messing a little with the IMDB order of things here - I'm skipping over Hot Tub Time Machine 2 - the version I watched last year didn't feature Cusack (and it was AWFUL), but he appears uncredited in the unrated version for a few seconds - watch here)

I'll also come back to Chi-Raq which is next listed, and skipping on to Cell, which I watched with a (thankfully) free Amazon credit.

After 2007's 1408 Samuel L Jackson and Cusack reunite for another Stephen King adaptation. In this, a weird signal suddenly pulses through everyone's mobile, or Cell, phone, turning them into mad zombie types, bashing each other over the head, planes falling out of the sky etc. Those lucky enough not to have their phone pressed to their ear quickly scarper and band together to fight the evil.

The start of this is very fast paced, we quickly establish Cusack's situation, living away from his wife and child for a while and at the airport, thinking of heading home to them when the evil Cell signal strikes. Everyone very quickly accepts the situation, rather than running around trying to work out what happened. The rest of the film is given over to grouping together and attempting to fight the evil, with a weirdo apparition turning up in their dreams etc.

I can barely be bothered writing anymore about this  - it is terrible FULL STOP. Interesting enough premise, but I'm not really a fan of crazy zombie type stuff, and no character is interesting or sympathetic enough to invest in. AVOID.

1408 (2007)

Tagline: No one lasts more than an hour.
Cusack plays: Writer Mike Enslin

Since The Shining, hotel rooms have been really creepy places, which Cusack's character acknowledges in this reasonable, but not terrifying horror, based on a Stephen King short story (Cusack's second King adaptation, after Stand by Me).

Mike Enslin is a writer, who has made a career of visiting haunted hotels and inns and rating them on a scary skull scale, despite the fact that he doesn't believe in the paranormal. He receives a postcard warning him not to check into room 1408 ("=13, cute") at New York's Dolphin Hotel. Despite the protests of manager Samuel L Jackson ("It's an evil fucking room!") he checks in and almost immediately the horror begins, with the clock counting down one hour, and the Carpenters 'We've only just begun' blasting out.


Largely Cusack's film to carry (with some flashbacks and minor creepy characters) he does a pretty decent job as a desperate and haunted (dead daughter in his past) man, but while the shocks and jumps work well in a dark cinema they just don't have the same effect watching at home on a sunny day. Depending on which dvd version you have, there are different endings, the orginal one having been reshot for theatrical release, and I had the original one. Reading the description of the other, I think I probably preferred the one I was given. Don't recall which one it was when I first saw it at the cinema...

Stand by Me (1986)

Tagline: For some, it's the last real taste of innocence, and the first real taste of life. But for everyone, it's the time that memories are made of.
Cusack plays: Denny Lachance, deceased older brother of central character Gordy.

This is Cusack's second film for director Rob Reiner (after The Sure Thing), although he appears in only a couple of flashback scenes as the dead big brother who Gordy feels he will never live up to, and was kinder to him than his parents. The film is a 80's classic with brilliant central peformances from the four young actors in the central roles. Its always sad to watch the River Pheoenix scenes, such a talent. Four kids (with baggage eg a crazy father, fatness, from a family of criminals) travel to find the dead body of a local boy in the woods. They contend with their issues and nasty bully Keifer Sutherland along the way.