'The Shining' Movie Review

I'm not into old movies, especially since I’m a Millennial with an extremely short attention span and the options on my Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now TV are overflowing, so much so that I often get stuck in the Infinite Browsing Mode, being repeatedly beaten by the phenomenon of Overchoice and end up quitting without watching anything.

I’m also a bit of a movie snob when I come to think about it. I like well-made movies with a high rating so I don’t waste my precious time on mediocre mindless brain pukes, so naturally, I am a re-offender of stalking the Five Star Rating category. Yesterday as I was habitually combing through the list of five-star films on Now TV and encountering the same dilemma of being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices, The Shining just happened to be there, attracting my attention with its conspicuous big lettering among all the other attention-seeking missiles.

I’ve heard of the name The Shining before and knew it was based on one of Stephen King’s novels, and I’ve seen plenty of memes floating around the social media for quite a while now but never really fully comprehended them. I have neither read the book nor watched the film but now it seems The Shining has finally managed to come up with a sequel, Dr Sleep, and it’s currently being hyped by the fans and media, so I finally decided to watch it to get some background information just in case I wanted to watch the new one.

Yeah, with the attention span of mine, I managed to watch it 'til the end, in small digestible chunks among internet surfing, baking and other distracting activities. I have no prior knowledge of the content of the film nor read any narratives related to the film and here’s what I have to say about it in my own words.

Ok, I presume you all have watched it religiously and repeated many times over, but just to conform to the film review format, I will once again bore you with a briefing of the story. It describes a family, Jack the caretaker, Wendy the wife and their boy Danny, who took temporary residence in the Overlook Hotel in the Wintertime while they were snowed in to keep up the maintenance of the boilers and whatnot. Then just like the previous caretaker Mr Grady who axed his wife and two little girls down, the father Jack caught the Cabin Fever and he tried to axe down his own family following the shining example of his predecessor. The black man who was the chef of the hotel drove up the mountain with a snowcat to check on them and got hacked to death instantly by Jack. But Wendy and Danny managed to escape in the end in the snowcat while the Jack froze to death in the maze trying to catch Danny.

Hey, wake up, I hope I didn’t bore you to death but here’s the exciting part, my review. I am sure for a movie with a five-star rating among all the other greatest immortals, The Shining has was praised with high regards from every possible angle by a myriad of media outlets and distinguished individuals so I shall spare you with all the ass-kissing and go straight to the critique part:

The first few minutes of the film killed the rest of the story and the rest became a bad joke. After the hotel manager told the viewer what happened to the previous caretaker of the hotel, there was nothing left to the imagination, and instead of horror suspense, the film was becoming a long dread of a somewhat comic panning out what we already know and nobody is scared of nothing unless you are some special kind of wimp.

The sound effects were crude and the high pitched noise was downright irritating. I watched it in the comfort of my own home and was already having a migraine, I can not imagine what kind of torture the audience in the cinema had to go through. That alone is a horror in and of itself and should be integrated into torture chambers as part of the curriculum in global spy training academies.

Jack Nicholson was a good actor, that was evident in his extravagant acting skills fully demonstrated in the film. But when he stuck his tongue out several times among other dramatic expressions, it went from drama heaven to porn hell and I took a pounding of disgust in my stomach as it happened.

The snow was too obviously fake. The grains were too fine and they did not look like real snow, more like a heavy fog.

Ok, that’s about what I can think so far. Otherwise, it is a great film, as great as everyone else says, please don’t hurt me, and thank you for reading.