Dr. Sleep – 2019 – R
Let me just say that 40 years is a long time to wait for a sequel! To amp up for Stephen King’s Dr. Sleep, I dropped $3.99 and rented Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining. In memory of my money forever lost to Amazon Prime coffers, I’m coining a new film category, “Horrible Horror.” The Shining was flat ridiculous. Silly. Absurdly laughable. Who gets terrified by a little red-headed tyke wandering around hoarsely repeating red rum, red rum? He sounds like he has the croup. I pulled up list after list of “Scariest Movies Ever” and I’ll be damned, The Shining tops every list. Go figure. Anyway, unimpressed by Shining #1, I skeptically reported to Shining #2, Dr. Sleep.
The movie is admittedly a bloody cut above it’s predecessor. How much a “cut above” you ask? Not much. Creepier than the screen action was being completely alone in the theater for the 2 1/2 hour runtime, a solitary first. With just me and all those empty seats, the sound had a definite reverb. I kept nervously glancing around, hearing disembodied creaking and rustling echoing from every direction. I couldn’t stop myself. Embarrassing.
All grown up Red Rum Danny boy, Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) has regrettably turned to alcohol, cocaine and naked lady romps to blot out that one unfortunate childhood winter at the Overlook Hotel. Understandably, being chased around a haunted hotel by your axe-wielding, deranged dad (Jack Nicholson) tends to have a lasting PTSD effect. After one too many bar fights and alcohol induced blackouts, Dan moves to a small New Hampshire town where he is immediately befriended by benevolent and intuitive, Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis), joins AA, sobers up and lands a hospice job attending to the dying. He’s assisted by lap cat, feline fatale Azzie who apparently channels Dan’s clairvoyance, taking a shine to the next person to die, Azzie plops on their bed for a cat nap. If you hear purring, start praying. Azzie the psychic cat helps Dan earn the moniker Dr. Sleep.
After eight uneventful New England years, Dan is jolted back to his paranormal shadow side when middle schooler, Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), psychically surfaces and makes a metaphysical connection. Teenage Abra is a super duper shiner, far more perceptive and powerful than middle aged Dan, but she urgently needs a co-shiner and Dan will do. Through Abra’s inter-dimensional, x-ray vision, she’s discovered a roaming cult of vampire-like, RV traveling hippies, The True Knot. This morbid gang of quasi-immortals kidnap, torture, kill and consume the dying breaths of psychically gifted children—just like her. They must be stopped. On two occasions we watch the ghoulish gang lure children of the shine to their deaths, a prolonged ritual of grisly mutilation and unspeakable torture led by psychopathic cult leader Rose The Hat (Rebecca Ferguson). Rose explains to her young victims how it works: the greater the terror and more intense the pain, the more nutritious and satisfying the ghoul’s sadistic feast. Through a rite of hellacious suffering, the child’s dying life force is released as visible “steam” sending the barbaric freaks into a macabre cannibalistic orgy. The graphic, nightmarish torture of a 9-year old little leaguer was a disturbing, degenerate scene, beyond monstrous, that took the film to a place it didn’t need to go. I can’t think of many—make that any—friends of mine who would sit through it.
When the action retreads to the snowy Colorado Rockies and the long abandoned Overlook Hotel, I perked up at the possible inventive intersections between Shine, the original and Sleep, the sequel. I even dreamed up my own fabulous ending that offered creative redemption to the denouement. Nope, this film powered down and, dare I say, ran out of steam. I was recently asked if I’d ever been to a movie that afterwards I wished I could unsee. I couldn’t think of any. New answer: Dr. Sleep. Horrible Horror.
