Anyone seen the sequel to The Shining? I haven't got the patience to read through twelve pages just to find out so I'm just gonna go straight in and tell you what I'm thinking...
It's called Dr Sleep and I'm watching it now cos it was on telly last night and I watched the first bit then and then paused it to finish off today. When it started and I was just idly watching it it took me ages to work out what the hell it was cos, although it's set some thirty years after The Shining, at the start it has bits with the kid and his mum and the caretaker as they were at the Overlook Hotel - and they do that by having actors who look a lot like the original ones but who clearly aren't them. At first it didn't cross my mind that it could be an actual sequel - although I now I've looked it up I do remember hearing about it and seeing people talking about it but I completely forgot straight away. Forgetting the title would be understandable in that it has no link to the original film, but I totally forgot that it existed at all, and as a result when it came on and I saw this kid riding round a hotel on a tricycle and talking to this woman who looked a lot like Wendy Duval, the only thing I could think was that it had to be some kind of pisstake or at least parody of the The Shining cos of the lookalikes and also cos it looks really sort of cheap. The main character is this bloke who looks a lot like Ewan McGregror, in fact it looks so much like him I kept pausing it and looking really carefully before I could conclude definitively, once and for all that it isn't him - although it should have been obvious that there is no way such a big star would appear in something that was obviously made on a shoestring and direct to dvd.*
It's a very odd film cos, despite having many of the same characters the two films feel completely different. I suppose a big part of that is cos one of them was directed by a talentless hack who seemingly turns out random films in whatever genre is required and who threw out most of the plot from the book to create a muddled mess of a film, and the new one is by this guy Mike Flanagan I know next to nothing about except that he directed a film about a haunted mirror which I watched a few years back.
I said that it's a very odd film which was a really poor choice of words cos one of the things that is peculiar about it is how normal and literal it is, while The Shining was ultimately a mysterious film which left lots unexplained, this one - after a confusing start (especially confusing if you think it's a parody) with lots of different characters in lots of different places - soon resolves itself into a rather straight-forward story that has exactly the same plot as David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.
It turns out that Danny Torrance (McGregor) has grown up into a beardy alcoholic who tries to hide his shining by being drunk all the time - which was lucky for him I guess cos the antagonist Rose The Hat leads a group of psychic vampires called The True Knot who hunt down children who are gifted with the shining and torture them to death so that they release a substance called steam which they need to consume to remain alive. The film splits into three parts with one bit following Rose and her evil friends, another following Danny and a third following a powerful child who will yield enough steam to nourish the baddies for ages. I'm guessing that Danny and the child must join forces to defeat Rose and co before she eats them.
*It is him
