I can see why Stanley Kubrick said no to Stephen King's script, because this was f**king awful.

This movie lacks a lottttttt of suspense. The book had more suspense, and was more horrific. The acting is pretty poor. The score is so-so. Kubrick’s version is way better considering it takes place in the 70s when the book was written. This version just feels so lackluster on how it’s done. It’s true that it has a lot more of the book to it, but it feels incredibly weak in every stimulating sense.

From Stephen Kings come’s a truly horrific new vision of his beloved novel, The Shining, as a cheesy 3-part ABC miniseries. Produced and scripted by King, recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance moves his family to the Overlook Hotel in Colorado after taking a job as the winner caretaker, but unbeknownst to them the hotel is haunted by evil spirits which begin drawing strength from their son’s psychic ability. Rebecca DeMornay, Steven Weber, and Courtland Mead lead the cast, giving awful performances; Mead in particular is ruinous, delivering some of the worst line readings. Though to be fair, the script is terrible. And the sets and make-up effects look incredible cheap, and aren’t the least bit scary. A complete trainwreck, Stephen King’s The Shining fails at every level.

In this version. It takes an hour for the family to even be at the hotel. That’s probably how slow the book was. Mick Garris was just being faithful to it.
However, the slowness could easily lose a viewers interest. Especially when it’s a 4 hours mini-series. If you want a version more faithful to the book. Then this is for you, though.
Since Jack doesn’t go instantly nuts and is a loving father and husband. Who is fighting his demons of being a former abusive alcoholic.

Just watched this for a second time and I really enjoyed it. Steven Weber does an excellent job at portraying Jack Torrance and so does Rebacca De Mornay as Wendy.

It is 4 hours long and I just watched it in 4 parts this time around instead of the whole thing at once and I believed this made me like it more this time around.

The topiary effects are terrible and I did miss the maze scene which was in Kubrick's version but these were the only 2 things that let it down for me.

Besides Jack Nicholson not starring in this version of Stephen King's book's adaption, this version is superior to Stanley Cubrick's one IMHO: it is scarier, it keeps closer to the book (which is a good thing) and it does not have an aweful cast (with the exception of Jack Nicholson missing, did I metion that already? ;-))!

However, there are certain things I did not like about it: the special effects of the animated topiary animals are just laughable! Why do them at all if they look that crappy? Some of the dialogues are laughable, too, espcially towards the ending. And it somehow just takes to long without build up much suspense. The ending is somewhat anti-climatic IMHO and I do not get whe King (who wrote the screen play) opted for that?!

All in all I would say it is a mediocre movie that has some really good moments in the middle part. Probably never going to watch it again and would recommend to read the book over watching this movie. However, if you _have_ to watch a Shining movies I would recommend you to pick this one instead of Cubrick's!

This is so much better than the shitty 1980 movie with Nicholson. Exactly by the book with all the emotions.