This is what I mean about the golden days of horror. We had Stanley Kubrick directing a horror movie. This is something we're just never going to see again, a top-tier director, one of the finest filmmakers in cinematic history, directing a genre film. What do we get now? Marcus Nispel, Samuel Bayer, Eli Roth, James Wan. Any of those names ring a bell? They don't and they never will because they're just cheap labor hired by the studios to make a film that brings in a few dollars and nothing else.
The plot: Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is hired to take care of the Overlook Hotel during the torrid winter months while the hotel is closed down. His wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and his son Danny accompany him, along with Jack's ambition to write a book during the long, cold months. The hotel manager tells Jack of an incident that occurred years before where a caretaker, such as himself, went crazy and murdered his wife and two daughters with an ax. Jack assures the manager no such incident will occur during his tenure.
As the long months draw out, we watch the family slowly start to fall apart. They refer to it as cabin fever, but really there is just something wrong with that hotel. There's an evil about it that just envelopes Jack and his son, to different degrees. The place just freaks Danny out, for the most part. We've all seen the sequences of Danny bombing around the halls on his Big Wheels only to find the ghostly apparitions of the twin girls urging him to play with them. I know grown men who got freaked out by those creepy girls, so imagine being a young child and seeing them.
The movie is a slow-boil, epic kind of horror film that gets better and better as it goes on, evetually leading to the complete melt-down of the family and Jack going psychotic. I would give the movie a 10 but I do have one small gripe that knocks it down 1 point. Oddly enough, it's Jack Nicholson. He does aa great job with the role, he's perfectly cast as the psychotic dad who loses his shit late in the movie. However, Jack looks a little too insane early on in the flick too. When they're driving in the car on their way to the hotel, there's a moment where Jack grins that creepy grin and raises his eyebrow and looks totally out of his mind. And this is early in the film! I just think he should have played a more friendly father and husband at the beginning, then when he turns on his wife and child it would be far more disturbing and the influence of the evil hotel would be even more evident. But, maybe I'm nitpicking.
It's an amzing film with a great score and an utterly fantastic ending. Jack's great, Shelley Duvall play scared well, and that poor kid is pretty awesome at being traumatized. Great story, great director. See it!
Next: Evil Dead II
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