Random Movie Review - The Shining (Stanley Kubrick)

Everyone has been talking about this film for years and everyone has considered it to be up there with some of the greatest horror films ever made and after so many years and requests to review this film, I finally got a chance to sit down and watch it earlier this year and honestly, I can now see why so many people love this film. Loosely based on one of Stephen King's novels (that guy by the way, hated this film for all sorts of reasons which eventually had him make a mini-series based on the book which is a thing that he did for all his books regardless of whether people like Stanley Kubrick will make a film out of it or not), let's take a look at this masterpiece:

So a guy called Jack Torrance (played by a guy who in my opinion, was born to scare, Jack Nicholson) arrives at the Overlook Hotel (by the way, unlike most of King's work, this is not based in Maine) to be interviewed for the position of winter caretaker as he plans to use the hotel's solitude to write. He gets the job and moves into the hotel with his wife Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall who I hear isn't doing so well these days) and their son Danny (ironically played by Danny Lloyd). The hotel gets snowed in and is closed from November to May. The manager, Stuart Ullman (played by the very first James Bond that came before Sean Connery, Barry Nelson) warns Jack that the last caretaker went insane and killed his family, but as you'd expect, that incident may very well be repeated here.

I can say without a doubt that despite not following the book word for word like in King's mini-series, this is a great film. It's scary, shows what can happen if you're left alone for so long and with no help and I feel it was the film that helped shape the careers of Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson as well as making the horror genre what it is today and I like it a lot. 9/10