The Shining was a Stephen King slash Stanley Kubrick masterpiece released in 1980. 40-ish years later, they release the sequel based on the Stephen King book “Doctor Sleep.” It’s a sequel to a movie that is groundbreaking horror, and it flopped like hell! How could a movie like this flop? I mean sure, more than half the movies based on Stephen King’s work are complete trash, and sure, so many sequels are complete trash, and sure, I could have just answered my own question just now.
Stephen King books have been a bellwether in the horror genre for more than 50 years, though I admit I haven’t read one since around 1990. I was a huge fan when I was younger, much like many Gen-X’ers who likely make up his largest audience, but then I moved on to different authors and just never came back to King. So it goes without saying that I didn’t know there was a sequel to The Shining. I care to bety that most people didn’t realize there was a sequel to The Shining. I also suspect that most people didn’t see this ad poster for the 2019 movie realized this was a sequel to The Shining. I mean, it’d been 40 years, it seems like King has also moved on. Would more of an audience show up to the theaters had they realized this movie was “The Shining Part Two: The Shinining?” Maybe? It seems a little late in the game to be revisiting and, when stacked up against a comparison to the earlier Kubrick work, how could you possibly expect anything to come close to that? Younger audiences didn’t care about this one, the movie failed to resonate with them (as can be expected – The Shining wasn’t in their emotional library), and the movie was released the week AFTER Halloween. What?! If you make a major horror movie and come late with it, you might as well just wait until NEXT October to release it!
The movie stars Ewan McGregor, someone Mido and I have been watching this month as we revisit the Long Way series for the third time. We’re avid motorcyclists, Mido and I, this series is essential viewing for people like us. Since we’re on a Ewan McGregor kick we might as well sink our teeth into this piece of…
Not shit. It’s a piece of not-shit. It was actually pretty good. Danny Torrance is a grown-up alcoholic drug addict who kicks the habit and takes a job in a hospice facility, talking with people as they die. Odd choice for someone overcoming addiction but it is what it is. In another part of the country, a group of hippie weirdoes are killing psychic children and sniffing their breath. A super-psychic child reaches out to Danny (Is he famous to other psychics? Maybe they saw the previous movie and now he’s their Yoda) and together they go on a hunting expedition to kill all the hippie breath-sniffers. The expedition naturally takes them to the old abandoned Overlook Hotel, because of course it does. The Overlook was famous for being completely inaccessible during winter, but I guess those days are over, the hippie hunters are able to drive a family car up the snowy road to The Overlook, which has been closed for 40 years but someone has all the electricity and water service still, and the interior of well vacuumed and dusted and in pretty good shape. You’ll have to suspend disbelief. You’ll also have to take with a grain of salt every single callback to the original Shining movie they do… and they do them all! Every single one! It gets a little tedious. It’s a game of “Hey ‘member when they did that thing? Well look they doin’ it again!!”
Otherwise I’d say it’s a pretty good movie that, in any other combination of influences, could have been a real crappy movie quite easily! I expected it to be crappy, and I was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t. It really shouldn’t be a good movie, but it defies expectations and becomes pretty watchable.