OxfordPress.com

By ELEANOR RINGEL
Cox News Service

"The Shining" is not Stanley Kubrick's shining hour.

But it is a finely crafted and unusual horror story, one that may not find favor among audiences bled and bred on obvious shockers like "Halloween." Though the supernatural is involved -- the setting is a haunted hotel, isolated from the rest of the world during the long Colorado winters -- the real scares in this film are domestic ones. The thing that goes bump in the night isn't some moaning apparition -- it's Daddy.

Daddy, in this case, is Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a would-br writer with an alcoholic's temper and a history of lost jobs. Mommy (Shelley Duvall) wears frumpy clothes and a frightened, apologetic smile. Their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), is an angelic kid with a demonic gift -- he has "the shining," a sort of all-purpose psychic ability.

Torrance accepts the winter caretaker's job at the mammoth Overlook Hotel, hoping the enforced isolation will make him churn out a novel. He's warned that a previous caretaker went nuts and gruesomely murdered his family, then himself. That won't happen to us, Smilin' Jack demurs, and already we sense trouble in that familiar Nicholson grin.

Once the family is sequestered in the Overlook, those troubles come roaring to the surface. Family tensions turn into family terrors, and though the corridors abound with eclectic ectoplasms, the ghosts play second fiddle to the homier horrors of familial strain. This is a modern horror movie, not because of the VWs and TVs as fans of the Stephan King novel might expect, but because the terror grows out of that safe little family whose members, traditionally, should band together against the bloody spectres of past wrongs.

The bloody spectre Kubrick must face -- and has not quite licked -- is audience expectation. King's reputation (he wrote "Carrie"), to say nothing of the ad campaign, suggests a ghost movie with the usual trappings, but Kubrick's concern is a different corm for audience intimidation. The film is less a haunted house picture than a diabolical "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with the emphasis on afraid.

Kubrick is emphatically successful at unleashing these domestic demons; he is less so with the incorporeal ones. Those determined to mine ghostly chills from the vastly re-emphasized screenplay will doubtless be frustrated by the lack of logic. Danny's visions are acceptable, but Jack's part supernatural, part disturbed psyche, are confusing. The hints at reincarnation have been better handled on "Twilight Zone." And the climactic night of terror never reaches the peak it should. In fact, the single scariest moment has nothing to do with spooks. It's when Duvall discovers that her husbandÕs much-worked-on manuscript consists of one sentence repeated over and over: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

I fear all work and no play has made Stanley a dull boy. Despite superb production values (John Alcott's fluid cinematography, Roy Walker's impeccable production design), and despite a bravura and terribly risky performance by Nicholson (he takes all those traits that have endeared him to us -- the smile, the cocked eyebrows, the ironic arrogance -- and mangles them into a madman's mask), "The Shining" ultimately doesn't work. Kubrick's scare tactics seem out of touch with today's audiences, accustomed to terrors as sharp and obvious and one-dimensional as an ax's edge. The horror that Kubrick finds in "The Shining" isn't too far from the one Coppola's Kurtz saw at the end of "Apocalypse Now." They both have their too-seeing eyes fixed on the horror that is ourselves.