Jack Nicholson gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. Everything about him just stares me in the face and issues a solemn reminder of how arbitrary and shallow fame is. Here is the ultimate one-note Johnny. He is the Angry, Unhinged Guy. I don't like Jack. But everyone I ever met loves The Shining. So I sat down and watched.

Only to realize a few minutes later that I had missed Say Anything..., which was playing on another channel.

What's wrong with The Shining? Well, we have Jack. Then we have Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick is not what I would call subtle. He's very talented, sure, and his films are unforgettable (for the most part), but too much of his approach is connected to style. Grainy film. Wide, sweeping shots. Eye-popping, surreal sets. We get it, thank you. All striking visuals, hardly any depth of character. To see one Kubrick film is to get a pretty good idea of what all the others are like.

I will admit, though, that this is a scary movie. There are really, truly disturbing bits. Kubrick's style works better in a horror film than in a straight drama. Kubrick just loves to be surreal and he gets to display his flair for the surreal right here. The whole first half-hour or so before Jack and his family travel to Colorado is so dreamy and weird and disjointed but yet still an important part of the story. Nicholson's character is still a relatively normal human being at this point, but Nicholson isn't believable. He still looks like a maniac.

Nicholson's presence is so huge and cartoonish that he takes over everything. Jack's wife (Shelley Duval) is reduced to a dumb, twittering ninny. The story is about Jack's kid (Danny Lloyd), too, but all we see is Nicholson's big grinning mug. I haven't read Stephen King's novel, but I'm pretty sure that Jack's wife and son are more than just the fringe characters they are in the movie.

The Shining practically started the whole shrieking-atonal-violin-music-during-the-creepy-parts convention. It's been done so many times since that to watch and hear it now looks corny. Same with the set design. The hotel is a monument to mid-70's chic. I can imagine that a person watching this movie in 1980 would have been freaked out by these garish nightmare-looking sets, but now they just look loud.

Psychological terror is the most important part of a horror movie and this one has it to burn. It's creep in a way you can't really identify and it would be even better if all the characters were equally strong and all moving through the story at the same pace. Which might have inspired the TV remake.

Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age