STEPHEN KING's "Rose Red" (1 Viewer)

[Grant B]

Prez Shrubs little monolog wiped out the 3rd night on the West Coast

When is th 3rd night going to be broadcast?

It's not that great but I feel like I have 4 hrs invested...I would at least like to know how it ends

 

[Matthew Chmiel]

When is th 3rd night going to be broadcast?

The third night wasn't on last night anywhere. First night is on Sunday, 2nd night on Monday, and the 3rd night on Thursday (ABC did the same thing IIRC for The Shinning).

 

[Steve Schaffer]

I was looking forward to this in HD, but it wasn't in HD here in Fresno. Mousehunt immediately preceding it was in gorgeous HD, but Rose Red was upconverted 480i in 4/3. I was very dissapointed but watched most of it anyway. I taped night 2 to watch on the regular tv in the bedroom.

 

[Dave Morton]

I thought this was very predictable. The ending was very blase'. The whole Emery's mother thing was really bad, imho.

 

[Bob McLaughlin]

Well folks, it's over, and the real question is: why the hell did I spend 6 hours of my life watching this?

I'd rate it an almost total failure: the acting was bad, I mean I've seen better acting by high-schoolers. There were too many characters with nothing to do but walk around and be scared, and just about everyone was downright annoying (except Julian Sands, at least in parts 1 & 2). And for a bunch of psychics, they never seemed to know what was going on.

The pacing was glacial. They could have made a 2-hour bad movie, instead they made a LONG bad movie.

But perhaps most disappointing was that King wrote such a completely unoriginal, derivative script. We've seen all of these things before in his own work or in other movies.

It's like he sat down and said "I want all these things in my haunted house movie", then built the loosest of plots to hinge all these scenes on, never caring if it actually made any sense.

I'm a big King fan, but I have to wonder what the hell he was thinking on this one.

 

[Dick]

I agree - an almost total wash-out. The leading lady is totally obnoxious and unlikable, like most of the characters. If this is supposed to be the "definitive" haunted house movie, then King must have forgotton everything he might have learned from THE HAUNTING (1963), THE INNOCENTS, THE UNINVITED (1944), even THE CHANGELING. Or, for that matter, THE GHOST BREAKERS. To produce this as a 3-part miniseries is nothing more than a very blatant attempt to milk a paper-thin story for everything it can (not for all it's worth, since it's not worth anything). This is the single most derivative and sloppy King adaptation ever. The most intersting plot element - that the house actually enlarges itself - is almost completely neglected, and instead we are forced to watch endless f/x shots of windows exploding, sparks flying, rotting corpse make-up and characters doing stupid things. I definitely wasted six hours on this piece of crap.

 

[Jack Briggs]

From what little I saw: a big yawn. And shame on Stephen King, because he knows better--and is a big fan of Robert Wise's The Haunting. This thing threw everything at us, a boo-a-minute roller-coaster ride purely driven by CGI pyrotechnics. Result? Boredom. Same ol' same ol'. And not in the least bit scary.

Have we forgotten how to do ghost stories right?

When I get the DVD of 2001's The Others, I will know.

 

[Brian Lawrence]

It was bad, real bad.

Another one of those films where I could of cared less if everyone in the film got killed off. A long tiresome sloppy hodgepodge of moments from better stories. King even steals from himself in much of this movie. I started rolling my eyes as soon as the girl made stones rain down on a house in the beginning of the first installment. I guess because that scene did not make it into the filmed version of CARRIE, King figured the average viewer would never know the differance. Either that or the man wrote the story as a tribute to himself.

The worst part of the film is that everything seems to be thrown in with no real rhyme or reason. It almost seems as if King grabbed a copy of Shirley Jackson's Haunting along with all of his own books, Threw them into a blender and then tried to serve it up as an original story.

This is another classic example of what Roger Ebert refers to as an idiot plot. (A film that would of came to an end hours earlier if not for the fact that every single charactor in the show is a complete idiot)

We have a woman played by Nancy travis that seems to go Fruit Loops for no clear reason. We have a group of people that are in this house for the purpose of getting evidence of some sort of super-natural mumbo jumbo, Well they get more than enough proof of this in the first day, Yet they seem to be unaffected by the events and choose to stay in this house that has a history of killing people off. We have the strange little girl that has "Carrie" like abillities and also happens to be a little touched in the head. While her older sister tags along to watch over her, There must be at least 5 times in the film where the girl seems to be wandering off by herself in a dangerouse house while no one even notices.

It also seems that whoever directed this film finds exploding glass to very scary, as this film seems to set the new record for most broken glass in a single film. "Please note that no actuall glass was harmed or injured in the making of this film"

As bad as Jan De Bont's remake of The Haunting was, It's pure Hitchcock next to this clunker.

 

[Stan Rich]

I believe King has not fully recovered from his accident and is experiencing black outs??or some other trauma..as this pile of trash will attest to.