Stephen King's The Shining featuring Mick Garris

The Shining Mini Series – 1997

     As a book worm I’ve often wondered what a movie that’s entirely faithful to the book it’s based on would be like.  A few good examples are George Orwell’s 1984 ironically released in the year 1984 or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road(2009) and let’s not forget Stephen King himself with The Mist(aside from a few minor details and the bad downer ending) and The Shawshank Redemption .  The 1997 made for tv remake of The Shining is not a good example.  Not because it deviates from the book but because it does not.  In fact I think it may very well be the best example of why movies should be made to disregard elements from the books they’re based on.  You’d be doing yourself a favor by just reading the book instead since the movie is pretty much a copy and paste representation of the book.

     One of the issues this miniseries suffers from is Mick Garris.  I think Garris might actually be a Stephen King fan himself judging by how many of his stories he’s adapted.  Just seeing his name on the opening credits for a Stephen King movie is enough to make me cringe.  Desperation is one of my favorite Stephen King books and the first one I read from start to finish, and Garris totally butchered that one.  Not to mention there was no reason to release it as a tv movie.  The book is far too graphic.  In the first 100 pages a little girl gets her face blown off and later on an elderly veterinary doctor gets ripped apart by a bobcat.  I may have been 13 or 14 the first time I read the book and back then it seemed like every year Stephen King released a major motion picture to theaters, and I remember thinking even then there is no way Desperation can ever be made into a movie.  But we're not talking about Desperation.  As it stands there is no way The Shining can be adapted as a movie let alone a miniseries.  The book is just too boring and uneventful and maybe it’s just me but I don’t like watching movies where nothing much happens.  I should point out here I have nothing against Mick Garris.  I’m a huge fan of Masters of Horror and to a lesser extent Fear Itself but half of the time whenever I see his name attached to a Stephen King project I know it’s going to suck.  For instance The Stand was good(I have not read the book), but Riding the Bullet was not(entirely meaningless if you ask me. You could read the short story in the time it takes you watch the movie), Sleepwalkers was okay(in a campy sort of way), Desperation totally sucked, Quicksilver Highway was good, The Shining is not.  I haven’t seen it or read the book but Bag of Bones didn’t get very reviews either.

 Your director ladies and gentlemen in an entirely meaningless 5 second cameo

     The casting is pretty bad too.  Steven Weber plays the father, Jack, Rebecca De Mornay plays the mother, Wendy, and neither of them is believable either as partners or parents.  They have no chemistry with one another, De Mornay has no chemistry with anyone really.  I don’t want to demean her or her acting ability but she seems like little more than just a pretty face in this movie or at the very least a recognizable one.  After looking at her IMDB creds I can’t remember seeing her in anything where her performance was any good.  Risky Business I guess but it’s kinda sad to say the best thing she’s been in was where she played a prostitute, especially since she plays a mother in this one.  Weber has better chemistry with his son but his acting is just so over the top in this one.  I don’t know who to blame for that so I’m just going to blame Garris again.  What makes these two so hard to believe as parents is that they’re rarely seen together doing anything as a family.  Throughout a majority of the scenes in this movie Jack is doing his thing separate from both Wendy and Danny.  Danny himself is often wandering around the hotel or around the grounds by himself.  Wendy only seems to show up to chastise Jack for losing his temper.  So assuming any of these characters had any chemistry with any of the others they are never together long enough for it to make a lasting impact.  I guess I could talk about the actors who play Hallorann or Ullman but honestly they don’t have much screen time in this movie and as far as everything else goes they actually did a pretty good job.  And I saved the worst for last.

     Courtland Mead(I can’t get over the idea that his name sounds like a Ren Fair beer stand) plays Danny Torrance.  I’d hate to play the gender card here but I think most times the only movie goers that are dazzled by child actors are women.  A few notable exceptions for me are Natalie Portman in Leon: The Professional, Kirsten Dunst in Interview With the Vampire, Christina Ricci in Addam’s Family, and Chloe Grace Moretz in Let Me In.  I realize it’s a little hypocritical to name only female child actors but it seems like every time a male child actor hits the screen it’s like the directors tell them to sweeten it up and act really cutesy.  That annoying kid from Jerry McGuire and that dull emotionless monotone kid from The Ring still haunt my nightmares.  Well I guess Haley Joel Osmant and Daniel Radcliffe were pretty good.  It’s strange but it seems to me that the boy actors get the cutesy roles where the girls get the dramatic and emotional ones.  You’d think it would be the other way around.  Courtland Mead is the exception.  I think he was meant to be cute but he isn’t and what’s worse is he can’t act or deliver lines all that well either.  Most of his lines he flat out flubs due to the fact that for whatever reason he can’t breathe out of his nose.  Every time this kid was on screen I was distracted by his wide gaping mouth and dull vacant stare.  Think I’m exaggerating?  Here’s a little visual aid to help you out:

Does anybody have an inhaler or some allegra?

     Now that we’ve got the directing, casting, and acting out of the way how well does the script/story hold up?  Well Stephen King wrote the teleplay for this version of The Shining himself.  I think he admitted when he saw Kubrick’s version he didn’t really like it and I can see why.  Kubrick’s while superior to this one is vastly different from the story Stephen King was trying to tell in the book.  Kubrick cut out a lot of things that would have just made the movie longer and weren’t really needed to tell the story.  King’s version of the movie includes every single event whether necessary or not causing the movie to become so long it had to be split into 3 different 90 minute episodes, which were probably well over 2 hours on tv.  That means this miniseries was just one movie shorter than The Stand, a book which was twice as long as The Shining.  For whatever reason King decided to add and change a few things.  In the book Jack realizes how bad his alcoholism is and how much it is affecting his family and quits.  In the miniseries he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous and is even seen going to a meeting.  This is one of the things that bothered me the most about this miniseries.  In the book his decision to stop drinking is a sacrifice he makes by himself out of love for his family, by making him seek out help it diminishes this sacrifice and turns Jack into a weaker character.  In another scene Jack destroys the CB radio in his sleep and blames Danny for it and this happens right after Danny is brutalized by the ghost in room 217.  In the book he takes full responsibility for destroying the radio himself.  It’s just a really weird scene and makes Jack out to be a bad guy before he starts attacking his family.

 I'm not very good at spotting continuity errors or visible equipment but when I do it's gotta be pretty obvious.  What's worse is this happens in the first hour of the first episode.  If that isn't a bad omen I don't know what is.  Hey guys guess you shouldn't have cleaned the windows so good for this scene.

After reading the book I really didn’t see anything that was so vital it needed to be split into 3 different parts totaling four and a half hours.  The casting, acting, directing, and story are all bad and uninteresting.  The pacing is just about as bad as it was in the book.  For all these reasons I’m going to this book the lowest rating I’ve ever given anything, 2/100.  It’s an utter failure in every way and it’s certainly not worth your time even if you watched just one of the three parts.  I’ve seen some bad Stephen King adaptations(Sometimes They Come Back, “The Lawnmower Man”, The Running Man, 1408, The Langoliers) but this one is by far the absolute worst.  If you want to catch some good King movies I’d suggest Night Flier, Cat's Eye, The Mist, the other Shining movie, and Creepshow.