Wampyrii doesn't live here any more. Play nice y'all. :)
Wampyrii doesn't live here any more. Play nice y'all. :)
Member since:15.09.2000
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Stanley Kubrik, Jack Nicholson and Stephen King all having a hand in the same movie? It could only ever have been a classic then couldn't it. But this isn't just a classic of the horror genre, it is also one of the few movies which will truly disturb you both during its showing and for a long time afterwards. It is psychological horror at its finest, one of the most difficult types of movie to actually get right, but here Kubrik manages to hit it right on the head.
The original Stephen King novel was scary, and quite powerful, but the movie surpases this if you ask me. Here, Jack Nicholson plays Jack; a writer with a mental block who when offered the opportunity to be the janitor at a remote, soon to be deserted hotel, accepts gleefully. He and his wife and son could do with the money and of course, here in the peaceful mountain solitude he will have the opportunity to finish his next long awaited novel. That is the plan. However, on arrival we are given an inkling as to what is in store for the family. The hotel's cook takes a liking to their son and tells him that the hotel is not all that it seems and that bad things have happened there in the past. It transpires that the previous janitor went mad and killed his wife and twin girls before dispatching of himself. Still, unperturbed by this, Jack still accepts the job and with with closing heavily around them, they move into the hotel. Things start to go wrong from that point onwards and Jack begins to decend into madnesss, the same kind of madness which befell the previous janitor. He talks to a long departed barman about his troubles and is of course informed of how to solve them. His son sees visions of the twins and an animated corpse in a bath...a torrent of blood gushes from the elevator doors...things go from bad to worse as Jack madness decends into murderous intent and his wife tries to escape both him and a maleavolent force within the hotel which is intent on claiming new victims.
Jack Nicholson does 'mad' very well, in fact, he rarely does anything other than mad or variations of it. Here, he puts on an absolutely stunning performance, so totally believable and impressive that he will scare the hell out of you, I promise. Shelly Long as his wife doesn't seem to do much but scream, shake and attempt to force her eyes out of their sockets in every scene which I suppose is an understandable reaction when faced with a hotel full of ghosts and an insane husband weilding a rather wicked looking axe. Ugly is the only way I can describe her performance. The kid is well, a kid, his performance is ok, and one of the most scrotumtighteningly tense scenes is reserved for him. He rides his tricycle around the corridors of the hotel at breakneck speed(well for a kid on a tricycle), the sound rattling on the hard floors and then muffled by the soft carpets alternately as we await the impending horror which we know is lurking somewhere waiting to ensnare him...
The camerawork and effects are in all honesty nothing special, but this is not where the movie draws its appeal from. Its strengths are in the emotional intensity of the atmosphere it builds up and then unleashes upon you, jangling every nerve ending in your body. It may look a little dated now, very early 70s/80s, but its intensity hasn't diminished at all. If you are looking for a movie which is going to scare you half to death then you came to the right place. This is the finest psychological horror movie I have even seen and will take a hell of a lot of beating. Superb.
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