What is it?
The 1980 British-American psychological horror film The Shining that was directed by the director Stanley Kubrick, was based on the 1977 novel The Shining by the author Stephen King, and stars the actor Jack Nicholson and the actress Shelley Duvall.
What is it about?
This is how the IMDb describes this film:
A family heads to an isolated hotel for the winter where an evil and spiritual presence influences the father into violence, while his psychic son sees horrific forebodings from the past and of the future.
What do you like about it?
I liked the visuals and cinematography, some of the sounds and music, the location, and how the film ends in a way that confuses you and makes you think as you try to interpret that reveal.
What would someone else like about it?
I think that people will like how this film still holds up all of these years later, and that they will realize that it is a classic that has inspired other horror films.
Final Thoughts
I saw this on Netflix on an old CRT television and I was surprised how good the visuals looked for a movie from 1980, but I did not like some of the early dialogue and I did not like a lot of Shelley Duvall’s performance (mostly her delivery of her lines) until near the end when she did not talk as much.
I also think that this movie should have been shorter or that they should have taken that extra time to better explain some of the history of the hotel and / or to explain more about what was really going on there.
One of my favorite scenes is probably when the character Dick Hallorann (who was the cook and was played by Scatman Crothers) was talking to the character Danny Torrance (who was the son and was played by Danny Lloyd) as he ate some ice cream, that scene is what really pulled me into this movie, and the movie kept my attention for a lot of the movie after that.
While the movie had its flaws, those flaws were still not enough to stop this from being a classic that still holds up well, and it left me wanting to learn more about what was really going on there.
The end,
-John Jr
John Jr's Blog 