Cinema Sweet

The second film in our series of Horrifyingly Good Hallowe'en Movies is...

The Shining
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Released: May 23, 1980

"Here's Johnny!"


These immortal words have been repeated and parodied so many times that you might think they'll never be scary again. You'd be wrong.

Based on the book of the same name by the master of horror, Stephen King, 'The Shining' is a skin-crawlingly claustrophobic psychology horror film which sees the Torrance family move into the isolated Overlook Hotel where the father, Jack (Jack Nicholson), a recovering alcoholic, will work as the caretaker throughout the winter months while the hotel is closed and completely cut off from the outside world by the snow. Jack is undeterred by the hotel manager's warning about cabin fever, planning to use the solitude to work on his writing, even after he is told that a former caretaker, Grady, went insane and murdered his wife and daughters with an axe before shooting himself.
Jack's son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), is not as enthusiastic about the hotel after he begins to have terrifying premonitions about it, told to him by his 'imaginary friend', Tony. The cook, an old African-American man called Dick Hollorann (Crothers), tells Danny that these premonitions are actually a 'Shining' - something which he possesses too. But the hotel also has a 'shine' to it, and some bad memories staining it to boot.
Things begin to go badly wrong a month after the Torrance's move in. In the empty hotel, Danny repeatedly encounters two young girls, who he also 'sees' lying butchered in a corridor beside a bloody axe. And then there is the woman in 237 who attempts to strangle him - the woman whom Jack also encounters but tells his wife Wendy (Duvall) that he saw nothing in the room. Jack's slow descent into madness becomes increasingly more terrifying as he imagines a ghostly bartender serving him drinks in a completely empty and unstocked bar, and then a full blown costume party where he encounters a waiter he believes to be the former caretaker, Grady, who tells him he must "correct" his wife and child. As Danny is haunted by the word 'redrum', Hollorann races to save them, and Wendy discovers the chilling 'writing' which Jack has been doing since they arrived, Jack begins to stalk the halls of the possessed hotel with an axe... And you know what they say. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Forever. And ever. And ever.

The film deviates from the book in several crucial ways. For example, where Tony is an actual figure in the book (a representation of the future Danny Anthony Torrance), he is reprisented in the film by Danny putting on a gruff voice and talking to his finger, and I think it loses something in this, and perhaps even gains a hint of the ridiculous. The creepy hedge animals in the book are replaced by a hedge maze in the film, losing another whiff of the supernatural. The roque mallet which Jack terrifies his family with in the book is instead an axe in the movie. The fate of Hallorann is significantly different, and a little disapointing I found. The ending, too, is very different, although the eventual outcome is virtually the same.

It is undoubtedly a good film, a classic, and it deserves to be watched. The claustrophobia is reasonably well portrayed, and some parts are genuinely chilling, but the problem is that others just aren't. The film would have been far better if it had tried to follow the book, but in many ways it doesn't. The supernatural element which makes King's novels so very unsettling appears to be downright ignored - the inhuman evil of the hotel itself is overlooked by the madness of Nicholson's character. That's another huge problem with it. What should be a slow descent into madness is altogether too fast and unrealistic, ruining what was in King's novel a tragedy about a man succumbing to both the supernatural and the very real powers of alcohol and rage. Jack Torrance's character comes across as evil, when in fact he is a loving family man who is led terrifyingly astray - this is obvious in the novel, for example, by Jack regaining one last shred of his personality before his death to tell his son to run and that he loves him. I can fully understand King's hatred of the film. Kubrick took his character and tore it to shreds.

All that said, you should still watch this film. It will genuinely chill you at least once, I gaurantee, and it is a classic. My only advice is that you watch the film before reading the book, because otherwise the film will be a massive dissapointment. But do read the book, and please feel free to leave your own opinions here about which is best - as an avid reader and a Stephen King fan, I may be a little biased.

Cinema Sweet Rating - 7/10 (9/10 for the novel!)

The first film in our series of Horrifyingly Good Hallowe'en Movies is BeetleJuice!

Starring: Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Winona Ryder
Director: Tim Burton
Released: March 30, 1988

Beetlegeuse, Beetlegeuse, Beetlegeuse! Say his name three times to summon him, or just pop the DVD into the machine to watch Keaton's hillarious stripe-suited ghoul in this brilliant comedy-horror which is so funny you might die.

Barbara (Davis) and Adam (Baldwin) Maitland thought that a vacation spent redecorating their quaint country home in Connecticut would be perfect. Little do they know that their home is about to get a very unwelcome makeover, not to mention their lives. After crashing through a covered bridge and plummeting into the river below, the couple find themselves back in their home with no memory of how they came to be there. When they realise that they cast no reflections, cannot leave the house without entering a terrifying sand dimension populated by giant hungry sandworms, and have been left a Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the Maitlands realise that they did not survive the crash, and are dead.
As if death wasn't bad enough, the Maitlands have another problem on their hands - unwanted housemates. A new family, the Deetzes, is moving in, and the mother, terrible sculpter Delia, and her interior designer Otho want to turn the Maitland's precious home into a gaudy piece of pretentious pseudo art. Hope comes in the form of Lydia (a very young Winona Ryder), Delia's gothic teenage step-daughter who is willing to believe in the ghosts and so is the only one who can see and speak to them.
The Maitland's efforts to scare the Deetzes out of their house prove fruitless, and when their afterlife care worker Juno informs them that they have to stay in the house for 125 years, they are desperate. Enter Beetlegeuse (Keaton) - an obnoxious, disgusting and devious ghoul who claims to be a freelance 'bio-exorcist', able to get rid of the living. After making himself at home in the detailed model of the town Adam has built in the attic, Beetlegeuse gets the Maitlands to summon him by chanting his name three times, despite Juno's warning that he is bad news. Meeting the mischevious character makes the couple understand Juno's warning and they choose not to accept his help... But they forget to unsummon him, allowing Beetlegeuce to run amock and very nearly kill the Deetzes during another attempt from the Maitlands to scare them away. With the fiend safely back in the model and the couple now deadly certain that he is indeed bad news, what could possibly go wrong? But the crafty Beetlegeuse has more tricks up his sleeve and, worse still, he has a crush on Lydia. With the Deetzes now trying to make money by exploiting the ghosts of the house, and Beetlegeuse planning a wedding to die for, the Maitlands have a lot more problems on thier hands than death.

Beetlejuice (the title spelt as the phonetic of the character's name) is a wonderfully bizarre and creative film. The special effects are impressive for a film of its time, and there is a perfect balance of comedy, romance (even in death, the Maitlands are still in love), horror (though tame for the Saw generation), and fantasy. The insight into death is original and intriguing, with a seemingly eternal waiting room for corpses waiting to see their case workers, coupons, and even a handbook. Keaton's portrayal of the devious Beetlegeuse is hillarious and, though the film may have been better with more of him in it, his scenes are the funniest in the movie. The jokes may border on slapstick from time to time, but Beetlejuice is undoubtedly a funny film which will make you want to say the name once, twice, and most certainly three times over!

Cinema Sweet rating: 8/10

Ahh, Hallowe'en. The one day of the year when kids and grown-ups alike lose their inhibitions and indulge in every costumed fantasy known to man, from the scary to the daring and everything in between. But aside from a gallon of fake blood, a pumpkin full of candy, and a devilishly good costume, what makes Hallowe'en such an intesting and amusing holiday? Why, the movies of course!

From now until Hallowe'en, I will be reviewing what I consider to be some Horrifyingly Good Hallowe'en Movies! If you have any suggestions you'd like to see, leave a comment, but I should warn you - I'm not a horror fan, the cheesy and cliched plotlines nearly always fail to thrill or chill me, so my reviews will not be your average array of gory nightmare-inducers about pretty teenagers getting hacked to pieces by axe-weilding maniacs. There will be very few, if any, of the typical Hallowe'en horror flicks on this blog.

Instead, I shall be reviewing what I consider to be the real gems of a Hallowe'en movie night - a movie you can actually watch without hiding behind a cushion the entire time; a movie which you can laugh at instead of simply screaming.

Call them alternative Hallowe'en movies if you will, but these are the movies that Hallowe'en is made of.

Suggest at will