Citizen Critic Takes An Axe To One-Star Reviews of The Shining

Everybody’s a critic – and our Citizen Critic hosts Scott Janovitz and Greg Conley are the critics that critique them! On this funny and entertaining podcast, they read reviews of movies from established critics, as well as sharing user reviews from Yelp and Amazon, tearing all the critiques apart. In this episode, they celebrate the finale of The Outsiders by revisiting another Stephen King project - The Shining, ripping on a cranky reviewer of Stanley Kubrick's version from the Christian Science Monitor and Stephen King’s own thoughts on the film, as well as laughing at some one-star Amazon reviews of the book and the Stanley Hotel, which inspired the haunted Overlook Hotel where the story takes place.

The critic at the Christian Science Monitor did not care for the film at all, wondering, “Whatever happened to ghost stories?” that were “good creepy fun, not banal brutality.” He says the movie “showed too much” instead of creating an ominous mood by withholding violence. “You know what I love about ghost stories? Not being scared,” Greg jokes. They do wonder about some of the choices Kubrick made; for example, the “dog-suit blowjob” scene had a “lengthy backstory” in the book, but in the movie, “it’s a jump scare,” Greg says. “Though, if I were being fellated by a large man in a dog suit, I imagine I would have a similar look on my face if Shelley Duvall ran into the room!” 

The reviewer goes on to say that in any movie, “we have to care about the characters, and that is where Kubrick flunks out entirely...if he doesn’t feel for his heroes, why should we?” The guys respond, “Uh...because we have basic human empathy,” wondering if this critic is a psychopath for not feeling at all for a cute little kid on a tricycle. But Stephen King himself thought the movie was “heartless...technically flawless, but not very scary.” Scott and Greg both scoff at that; “Generations of movie watchers all agree, this is a scary movie,” Scott says. But he can understand why King wasn’t a fan, since Kubrick did make some major departures from the book. “It’s a standalone piece of art,” Greg argues, and Scott agrees, pointing out that King’s own remake wasn’t nearly as good as Kubrick’s take. 

A lot of laughs follow as they roast reviewers who hated the book because “nothing happens in it, besides the author describing the setting, the past, flashbacks, and other things over and over” (“Other than the cover-to-cover storytelling, nothing happens,” Greg interjects), and one-star reviews of the Stanley Hotel (including one very short one called, “Where is it??”). And does The Shining have strange similarities to the Nintendo Switch game Luigi’s Mansion? Scott thinks so. Listen to the episode for some great belly laughs about a great classic film on Citizen Critic.

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