Awful adaptation of a terrific--and terrifying, let alone actually scary--book.

Rating: 1/10 (9 August 2001)

Stephen King felt pretty happy about the adaptations of his first two books, Carrie being mirrored perfectly by Sissy Spacek in De Palma's 1976 classic and 'salem's Lot being fairly okay on TV in Tobe Hooper's 1979 adaptation. However, when Stanley Kubrick, one of the biggest and most famous directors ever, chose to adapt King's masterpiece of horror and great storytelling, Stephen King became cautious about who he chose to adapt and direct (not to mention how they are adapted and directed)--and with good reason. Virtually the only things in common between the book and the movie are as such: character names and roles, the title itself, and locations. All similarities end right there. Though fans of Kubrick welcomed this so-called "masterpiece" into their already-huge cult of Kubrick movies, fans of the far larger Stephen King world--even after only 3 books at the time--were severely disappointed. How could this movie be created? The characters' attitudes are far different than in the book (Jack Nicholson is an average schmo to start and immediately becomes grouchy, then kookie; Shelly Duvall is an eccentric wife that acts as if she has suffered many years of abuse; not to mention Danny Lloyd's ridiculously ignorant and indifferent and jaded attitude that quickly turns to psychotic episodes). Very bad acting goes into it all (virtually the only case of good acting that shows real characterization, however shallow, is Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran), and the directing is terrible. Over 12 obvious mistakes occur in this movie, including a clear shadow from the helicopter view of the Rocky Mountains at the beginning as well as a bending baseball bat used by Shelly Duvall on Jack Nicholson in one of many ridiculous conflicts and multiple parts of the door from the famous "Here's Johnny!" scene disappearing in several following scenes. And to top it all off, Stanley Kubrick was so convinced that this...rubbish...was such a good movie that he had a contract made so that any re-makes of the movie could not be released on video in the US. Luckily in 1997 a far more faithful adaptation was made, but unfortunately Mr. Kubrick's legacy of no-US-video had the movie appear only once on commercial television, never to be seen again unless it is on the video available overseas from Amazon.co.uk. This was a terrible scratch in the long film reel of cinema history, and hopefully will be mended & forgotten soon enough. All in all and simply put: this movie sucked. --MetalHorror