From King's Lips to Your Ears and Eyes

Rating: Null/10 (18 October 2011)

At the UCLA Westwood Campus the most devoted movie fans were to be found excited for the screening of THE SHINING in 1980 as excited as the group I was with.......some film students. It was at the Village theater and an EVENT. Cut to the film. After about 35 minutes of beautiful photography and establishing the hotel, and a hint of oddness emerging in Jack and his tennis ball throwing while Shelley Duvall managed to remain mostly in the b.g. while the kid started browsing the corridors and introducing us to some remarkable shots on a Tyler mount or similar at the back of his little plastic tricycle.......and then more beautiful shots of white skinned dead of bleeding or horror shot to be seen for a while during which time Jack is in the best lit bar of the hotel with the ghostly bartender and Jack flipping out on poor bewildered Shelley while great effects flood corridors and elevator entrances....That UCLA bunch of real critics started to get uncomfortable and waited for something just as my group and I wondered what the frig was wrong and why is Jack doing so much ad libbing? NO HORROR was really happening. When REDRUM was discovered as all that Jack was pounding out, I sarcastically yelled out OH NO! MURDER SPELLED backwards!!Well,it started a riot of moans and groans at the dull pace and popcorn and things were being thrown at the screen of the classiest cinema in West LA. EVERYBODY hated it except the reviewers from the LA TIMES. The DAILY BRUIN had the worst reviews and people were yelling REDRUM all day to any question and laughing mockingly. SHINING was a dud.Seeing it twice since, it was a dud. Last night on TURNER TCM Stephen King did a Holloween Special discussing horror, thrillers,suspense and was incredibly smart and funny and open..Well, to hear him talk about his difficulties with phone calls from Stanley Kubrick and concepts about points of horror on which they completely disagreed and did not have ONE meeting of minds as to how the film should work, they ended their talks with Kubrick asking King if he believed in God? King answered "he believed in Hell" and did not go to see the film till way after it was released and found it to be beautiful aesthetically, but a bore and totally non horrific and Kubrick's ending of the film in the snow as opposed to a fire, completely dull and not scary...I was double thrilled when I agreed with the author and especially at the end of the interview after seeing dozens of clips of horror, vampire,and suspense, monster,films, that at the very last question of his favorite horror film being the original THE INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, my OWN favorite, I realized my opinion of SHINING was right on.It sucked.