Welcome to the Overlook hotel. you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2015)

Stanley Kubrick's Version of the Shining butchers Stephen King's fantastic novel. by stretching it in other ways and omitting important plot points and adding others and making changes to the Overlook itself and how the Torrance family reacts to the Hotel.
That said. however Kubrick's version of the Shining is a outstanding and highly original look at King's novel. Which King hates. but Kubrick was a gifted director who knew what he was doing and he was a perfectionist which drove the cast and crew of this movie crazy. but Kubrick never lost sight of the story he wanted to tell. in the novel King explains that the Overlook is a large psychic vampire a large battery feeding off of the people there who had Psychic abilities . Making the Overlook a large battery that stores and contains the most emotional psychic moments of its existence. Happiness ,Death,Love , violence. all of these things go on and on in the Overlook . but in Kubrick's nothing about the Overlook is explained except in the barest of details .but that is more then enough. Here in the movie less is more. And while the Shining is Kubrick's movie it belongs to Jack Nicholson. while in the book the slide into madness is supposed to be subtle for Jack Torrance. In this movie he seems cheese and crackers right from the start which is fun to watch as you realize the cheese has slid off his crackers and he is dangerous . The best bit is the scene that leads to the staircase. Wendy stop swinging the bat Wendy..as he moves in to kill her in a moment of comic timing. Nicholson makes the movie his own. Jack is dangerous he is now a maniac bent of killing his family. But he has a sense of humor about it. which makes it creepy.
To me the part that keeps me up at night while thinking about it is only hinted at. When we are told Delbert Grady went crazy and killed his family with a ax. And stacked them neatly in one of the rooms of the west wing like cord wood. and then shoots himself. In the novel Grady kills himself long after his family he kills himself by shotgun because he has broken his leg falling down the stairs . To me the most horror filled moment is when you think about the little girls being killed by a ax. while one little girl looks on and sees her sister being killed by her father and knowing she is next. Does she run ? does she hide ? can you imagine the horror she must have felt knowing her sister was being chopped to pieces by their father and their mother was already dead. and she was next. That's the one point in the movie that gets me every time and with every viewing. That's how you know its a great movie. film making of the finest kind. And after seeing that and letting your imagination run wild with little scenes like the one I described . You can forgive Kubrick for his butchering King's novel because he did what he sets out to do. Telling King's story from a different view point. And scaring the daylights out of us . Its a great classic and deserves to be !