For some moviegoers, "The Shining," Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film about a psychic little boy nearly murdered by his father in an old hotel, is the Picasso, Beatles and Muhammad Ali of horror _ it was and always will be the best. The film has its detractors, notably the man who wrote the source-novel, Stephen King, but there's no dismissing its iconic visuals: the twin Grady girls, the blood-filled elevators and, of course, the rotted ghoul officially known as Old Woman in Bath.
Nearly 40 years later comes the sequel, "Stephen King's Doctor Sleep," based on the author's 2013 novel. If you were a fan of the first film, "Doctor Sleep" will be everything you feared _ and not in a good way.
For starters, it's not really a sequel, except in a purely chronological sense. Our hero is Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor), whose near-death experience in the Overlook Hotel has turned him into an alcoholic. His old friend Halloran (Carl Lumbly, replacing the late Scatman Crothers) is now a friendly ghost who dispenses good advice. Aside from that, though, "Doctor Sleep" may as well be an entirely new story.
It's filled with Kingly creations, notably a group of evildoers called (in the book) The True Knot. Essentially middle-American vampires who travel by RV, they're disappointingly mundane, even when torturing children and inhaling the "steam" of their pain. The only two who make an impression are a sinister hippie named Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson, nearly saving the movie) and a creepy cat named Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon). Somehow, Rose makes a psychic connection with a girl named Abra (as in "cadabra," and played by Kyliegh Curran), who in turn has been mentally communicating with Torrance as he goes through AA.
All of this leaves writer-director Mike Flanagan ("Oculus") well and truly stuck: He's paying homage to a horror masterpiece with a movie that's barely related to it. (The title refers to Torrance's new ability to put terminally ill people to sleep. Huh?) By the time we return to the Overlook Hotel for a grand finale, we've forgotten it ever existed. Re-creating the best moments of the original film � and re-using the footage of those bloody elevators _ isn't enough, and doesn't work. "Doctor Sleep" should have let "The Shining" rest in peace.
