The Shining (Two-Disc Special Edition)

Description

Shining, The: Special Edition (Dbl DVD)

“Heeeeere’s Johnny!” In a macabre masterpiece adapted from Stephen King’s novel, Jack Nicholson falls prey to forces haunting a snowbound mountain resort with a macabre history.

]]>Stanley Kubrick s The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King s bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King s book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick s movie is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel s labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer, who s settled in for a long winter s hibernation. As many have pointed out, King s protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick s Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him--all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director s fanatical demands for take after take after take.) The Shining is terrifying--but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of King s dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there--but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick s The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there s no place to hide... --Jim Emerson