Nasty, brutish and long

Rating: 3/10 (4 October 2003)

Though the best part of three hours long, The Shining simply flies past like an Andy Warhol triple bill: it's the very slowest commercial film I ever did see. Made by the world's most overrated director (who directed the world's most overrated film, 2001), with the world's second most charmless star (Jack Nicholson narrowly loses out to Marlon Brando in the Face You'd Never Tire of Kicking stakes), from a tuppenny-ha'penny shocker by arrested adolescent Stephen King, its reputation and popularity make a depressing comment on the decline of the movies.
Depressing also describes the film itself: it's far too ponderous and literal ever to be pleasurably scary, settling instead for presenting a succession of predictably edited horrors that each go on for a sadistically long time. A handful of bravura visual touches only help draw attention to the miles of slow-motion stodge separating them. However, I will allow that connoisseurs of the thrills to be savoured from watching women and children being systematically terrorised are in for the treat of their lives.

The Shining pretty much signalled the end of the intelligent and tasteful horror/spook film as a paying proposition, speeding the genre's descent into gore, grue and titillation. But it does improve one's appreciation of an earlier and less pretentious era of trash horror, typified by the films of William Castle and Roger Corman. Beside The Shining, drive-in teensploitation flicks like The Tingler and Fall of the House of Usher seem as scary as Don't Look Now, as funny as I Married a Witch, as poignant as Bride of Frankenstein, and - best of all - as short and fast as an episode of The Addams Family. Y'know what? They're just not making good rubbish like they used to ...