A SHINING RAZZIE THROWBACK!

by John Wilson

One of the most controversial choices our voting members ever made happened our very first year, when our scrappy bad-film society was less than 50 people. At that time, we nominated ten contenders for five top categories, including Worst Director. Among the ten contenders as 1980's Worst Director was Stanley Kubrick for The Shining, a film that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Even though Kubrick wound up "losing" to Robert Greenwald for XANADU, we still get "called on the carpet" for that nomination by movie buffs and cineastes four decades later.
 
Kubrick wound up being nominated in part because a significant number of our voting members that year had actually read Stephen King's novel, and were looking forward to seeing the book translated to the screen. I personally still consider the novel a far superior tale of terror to what Kubrick did with the source material. There were as well several extremely memorable "visual moments" in the book that I (and many a King reader) looked forward to seeing realized on film – including a scene where the intertwined snakes pattern of the hotel carpet came to life, slithering under the characters' feet, and the climactic sequence in which Jack Nicholson's character, armed with an axe, pursued his son through a topiary maze and those inanimate creatures suddenly (and chillingly) gave chase. Difficult as it may have been to bring such moments to the screen in pre-CGI 1980, in many a reader's mind, they were integral to what made King's novel such a scary read. And our voters apparently concurred: If you weren't going to bother including those scenes, don't call your film The Shining...
 
 
I should also point out that we are not alone in our less-than-favorable opinion of Kubrick's film – Stephen King himself, who says he was never contacted directly by Kubrick during the production of The Shining, later expressed his dissatisfaction by comparing the film version to "a shiny new Cadillac convertible...with no engine in it." In fact, King was so displeased with Kubrick's movie that he agreed to write and oversee a three-night miniseries adaptation of his novel in 1997.
 
But if you want the genuine experience of Stephen King's The Shining, we recommend that you go back to the source material, and read the novel yourself. You'll have a far more intense, terrifying and goose-bump-inducing good time than any dramatized version can deliver. And you may finally understand why revered director Kubrick deserved to make our very first list of ten Worst Director nominees 40 years ago...