Quite possibly King's best book -- despite the fact that it is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style. It's about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63 either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together. King, you see, is a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he reaches a happy confluence of both. Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him. But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny -- and for Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide. So this book is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail. That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability.
++++
Quite possibly King's best book -- despite the fact that it is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style. It's about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63 either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together. King, you see, is a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he reaches a happy confluence of both. Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him. But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny -- and for Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide. So this book is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail. That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability.
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++1/2 Sleazy TV exec (James Woods) and his sadomasochist girlfriend (Deborah Harry) are intrigued by the pirate broadcast of a new show that trades in torture and murder until they discover it is being used in a plot to control the minds of consumers. Not that that realization causes Woods to be any less sleazy nor Harry to be any less self-destructive, so good luck finding anyone to root for here. Starts out well, as a mystery-thriller, then devolves (its cult followers would no doubt remove the "d") into a full-blown reality-bender of a horror movie, in which anyone exposed to the show suffers graphic and sometimes grotesque hallucinations. Woods himself is shocked when, among other things, his abdomen develops an organic videotape slot. Cronenberg's fuzzy-headed commentary on the dangers of television (he clearly wasn't trying very hard to make a political point, though, in a vague sort of way, the movie presages torture porn and the rise of sex and violence both on TV and the internet) -- that, combined with characters like Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley), who thinks people don't get enough TV, virtually guarantees that this film's only real attraction is its surreal imagery and bizarre absurdities. Well, it has plenty of both. Harry, of course, is more famous for having been the lead singer of the rock group Blondie. ++1/2 Too-cute followup to King Kong, made for about a third the cost of Kong and released later the same year, has none of the gravitas of the former film but retains a bit of its charm. Ten months after Kong's death, his captor, Carl Denham, mired in escalating legal and financial trouble, can't wait to return to Skull island after he learns of great treasure hidden there. Along for the ride are old friends Capt. Englehorn and Charlie, the Chinese cook from his previous adventure, and new friend Hilda Petersen (Helen Mack), whom he met earlier trying to coax some monkeys out of a tree. (When Denham objects to her method of persuasion, Hilda asks, "Have you ever caught a monkey?") The first thing they find on the island, however, isn't treasure, but King Kong's son, a 12-foot white ape that, "Androcles and the Lion"-style, becomes a friend after they rescue him from quicksand -- setting him up to later on provide some of the film's aforementioned cuteness. It's worth noting, though, that this encounter doesn't occur until well after the halfway point in the film, which is only 69 minutes long (Kong was 100). The long prelude ensures that the island portion will be rushed (and so, too, the effects themselves, jerkier here than in Kong), as the filmmakers hurry to squeeze in four monsters in addition to little Kong, as well as an apocalyptic ending the gods themselves would be proud of. Better than the monsters, in fact, are the lovely and atmospheric landscape paintings sprinkled throughout and often animated, as in Kong, with flying archaeopteryxes. Robert Armstrong is still perfect as the dynamic Denham and Mack, though no Fay Wray, at least doesn't have to spend half her time screaming. With Frank Reicher as Englehorn, Victor Wong as Charlie, and John Marston as the cowardly Norwegian who originally sold Denham the map to Kong's island and who returns here to tell him about the treasure he didn't bother to mention previously. ++1/2 A man convicted of his wife's murder must enlist a friend to help him find his only alibi witness, the woman he randomly picked up in a bar that night after a fight with his wife. Problem is, he never got her name and no one, starting with the bartender, remembers seeing her with him. The stakes in this race-against-time story are made plain at the starting gate: Chapter 1 is titled, "The Hundred and Fiftieth Day Before the Execution." Not made plain is Woolrich's willingness to fiddle with our perspective in order to preserve the mystery, nor the extent to which he will strain our credulity in solving it -- to say his plot is far-fetched is to assume that it is within throwing distance in the first place. But there are other reasons to read a Woolrich novel, even a pseudononymous one. His penchant for the bizarre, for one, most evident here in a vignette about a man being tortured simply by being looked at, constantly, hour after hour. Also his hard-driving prose, though that is muted somewhat for being too thinly spread. Turns out the friend isn't his only helper, he's got another woman on his side, as well, and a cop who isn't sorry he busted him but who has come to believe he's innocent just the same. The shifts back and forth between them break the tension. Made into a movie in 1944. +++ Pre-Code adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The Island of Dr. Moreau is a notable horror film in its own right, though it departs significantly from the source material. That it will be different is given away as early as the credits when "The Panther Woman" is given equal billing with stars Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Leila Hyams, and Bela Lugosi. Wells didn't bother with women, feline or otherwise. Not till the closing credits do we discover that the Panther Woman is actually Kathleen Burke. (Burke, a dental assistant at the time, won a talent contest for the part.) Arlen plays the luckless man who unintentionally ends up on mad doctor Moreau's island of horrors, where Moreau (Laughton) is tentatively worshipped (and secretly hated) by the human-like creatures he has fashioned out of a variety of different animals in his feared House of Pain. Lota, the Panther Woman, is his greatest achievement; Moreau tricks Arlen into staying so that he can try to mate him with Lota. Wells himself didn't like this film, but then he didn't like Metropolis either. In fact, this is an atmospheric, exciting, and surprisingly adult horror movie that also has a few chilling moments, such as the one that shows us the ultimate fate of Moreau himself. But the best costuming and makeup in the film, in spite of all the weird creatures, is arguably that for Burke, whose erotic exoticism is one of the best reasons to see this picture. ++1/2 Decent slasher film, even if the filmmakers were so embarrassed by the YA source material, the novel by Lois Duncan, that they offensively buried that fact in the closing credits. True, the book left much to be desired, but the hook -- a group of young adults haunted by (and hunted for) a crime they committed the previous summer -- is the best thing in either version, and that belongs solely to Duncan. That said, screenwriter Keven Williamson (what he did the previous year was write Scream) does a couple of good things with Duncan's book: he eliminates nearly all of its romantic overtones and he adds much-needed pep to the dialogue. Its an open question whether turning Duncan's thriller into a horror movie was an improvement: neither approach works well enough to tell. But the movie is certainly a great deal more visceral. Gillespie gives it a smooth, professional look, and the Casting Director does the rest, hiring the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Freddie Prinze, Jr. as the teenagers who think they've successfully covered up their crime until a slicker-wearing psycho starts stalking them one by one. As usual, the setup is more interesting than the payoff. Followed by two sequels, the second of which went straight to video. ++++ Martians invade Earth one ship at a time for ten straight nights, build titanic tripedal fighting machines armed with heat-rays and chemical weapons, and set out to kill or consume mankind, beginning with the English. While it is interesting to note that had these Martians invaded only a few decades later, their technological superiority would have been eliminated and men would have made short work of them, this remains a compelling novel of survival in a world turned upside down almost overnight. Realistic and believable, thanks in no small part to Wells' choice of narrator, a hearty philosopher whose interest in his own harrowing story is augmented by a wider historical viewpoint, and whose moral sense (thankfully) rejects any notion of the innate preeminence of humankind. A thoughtful story, but also an exciting one, with enough apocalyptic destruction to satisfy all but the most jaded readers. Adapted twice to film, once in 1953, then again in 2005. Also famous for inspiring Orson Welles' "realistic" radio broadcast in 1938, which fooled a few people into believing Martians had indeed invaded. ++ Hammer's followup to their own 1965 version of H. Rider Haggard's novel isn't much of a sequel to the earlier film and it isn't based on Haggard's own sequel, Ayesha: The Return of She, either. It is "based on characters created by" the author, and that only barely. Most notably, She herself is absent. Oh, there's a young European beauty named Carol (Olinka Berova) who has, in essence, been nominated to take the Queen's place, but she's just an ordinary girl with no qualifications for the position other than her resemblance to Ursula Andress. On second thought, that makes her the perfect choice. For in this bizarre take on Haggard's characters, the great and terrible She-who-must-be-obeyed is reduced to nothing more than an impotent figurehead, Queen of the lost city of Kuma, which is actually ruled by a group of psychics called the Magi. If the film were honest about any of this, it might have worked. For instance, the one power She and her King, Kalikrates (John Richardson), actually possess is immortality; it might be interesting to see how an ability to outlive your opponents translates into political power. Instead, we get Phillip (Edward Judd), a psychiatrist who falls for troubled Carol -- and, significantly, a man who must ultimately save her. The only "vengeance" in this film is that directed at powerful women by sexist filmmakers. Which is odd because it was written by Peter O'Donnell, author of the Modesty Blaise books. Odder still in that the movie opens with an attempted rape that Carol appears to thwart with pre-Carrie psychokinesis, a talent that is never used again. (Can it be that even attempted rape is sufficient to render women powerless?) Senseless and silly, but the ending, by the Sacred Flame, isn't bad. ++ Lifeless, cliche-riddled sequel to Independence Day that, without Will Smith, is both uncharismatic and uncentered. Takes place 20 years after the original story, by which time Earth has been transformed into a science fiction wonderland of world peace, spaceships, and fancy new weapons that only work on misidentified aliens, not the real threats to its continued existence. Like the new mothership hovering over the Atlantic (which part of the Atlantic? a character asks; all of it, she is told) that, in its mission to drill down to and suck out the core of the planet, provides the authorities with a handy, helpful countdown clock to the end of the world. Young fighter pilots Liam Hemsworth and Jessie Usher (playing Smith's step-son from the original film) are supposed to make us care about the future of Earth, but that's hard to do when the future represented by these feuding hotshots, one of whom (Hemsworth) is just another follows-orders-only-when-he-wants-to military man, is so colorless and hackneyed. The oldsters, including familiar faces such as Jeff Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Bill Pullman, and Brent Spiner, frankly don't make us any more optimistic. Good special effects, though. ++1/2 Shirley Jackson's second novel is one of those literary compositions that begs the question, What's the point? It's too many things all at once: a coming-of-age story, a survivor story, a horror story, a psychological mystery, and a satire of college life. Reading it in several sittings, you never know what you'll encounter from one to the next. It is about seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite who, just before leaving for an all-girls college, is taken into the woods behind her parents' house by a man with evil intentions. What happens to her there is left to our imagination, but it isn't our imagination that really matters: Natalie is a lonely, imaginative child and her experience only exacerbates her mind's distortion of reality -- which gradually, under the additional pressures of college life, blooms into full-blown psychosis. Sounds straightforward enough, but that's just the magic of summarization. In between, Jackson writes thousands of words of over-contextualization to convey a few brief relevant ideas. On the other hand, some of her satire is funny, and there's one truly wicked scene in which a couple of girls who have eyes for the professor Natalie herself is infatuated with use her mercilessly -- but ever so politely. Then, too, Jackson has a marvelous talent for shifting from the everyday to the terrifying in the wink of an eye, as she demonstrates here in two scenes, one toward the beginning, the other at the end. This is a book not without its pleasures, but it isn't on the whole a pleasurable book. Ever so vaguely inspired by the real-life disappearance (not that Natalie disappears, except perhaps psychologically) of Paula Jean Weldon who, in 1946, vanished on a hiking trail in North Bennington, Vermont, where Jackson was living at the time and where her husband was working in the same college Miss Weldon attended. |
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