Excellent portrayal of descent into madness by Nicholson in this Kubrick directed scary film...

Rating: 7/10 (28 May 2001)

1st watched 5/28/2001 - 7 out of 10 (Dir-Stanley Kubrick): Excellent portrayal of descent into madness by Nicholson in this Kubrick directed scary film based on a novel by Stephen King. What seems to be lacking to make this a great film is some consistency in what was truly possessing Jack to do what he was doing. We get clues that there was a murder in 1970 at the same hotel, and later that something similar must have happened around 1921 with the strange coincidence that the top dog of the hotel back then looked like Nicholson. We also have a series of strange hallucinations seen thru the eyes of Shelley Duvall's character that lead us to believe the place has been haunted for awhile. This type of uncertainty seems to prevail in many of Kubrick's movies so I guess I should have expected this, but it seems that more information(possibly in King's novel) should have been included. But as a scary movie, with a knockout performance by Nicholson, as well as most everyone involved, there ain't too many pictures of this type that beat this. Sometimes the way to determine whether a scary movie does it's job is if you don't want to watch the movie again -- which happened to me, so I guess Kubrick did what he intended.