Post by Bartwald on Dec 30, 2005 11:41:15 GMT -5
Stephen King's ROSE RED (2002)
DIRECTOR: Craig R. Baxley
CAST: Nancy Travis, Matt Keeslar, Julian Sands, Matt Ross, Kimberly J. Brown
GRADE: 2/10
‘Can you please write the most terrifying haunted house story for us?’ is what the producers of Rose Red asked Stephen King. He thought he could do it, I guess – after all, he’s the master of all things terrifying. But, let’s be honest here, Rose Red ain’t this promised masterpiece of fright; it’s not WITHOUT scares exactly, but they’re all drowned in the sauce prepared from some rather stale ingredients (cliched characters, TV-quality special effects and predictable plot), while the lack of both suspense and good mystery doesn’t help us care for the outcome.
What King must have thought would be enough to call it ‘the greatest haunted house story ever’ unwinds more or less like that: a young woman, normally teaching about the supernatural, decides to carry out an experiment with a house that used to be a LAIR of the supernatural (people lost their lives there, obviously) but is now supposed to be a, uh, ‘dead cell’; the woman wants to wake this dead cell up and therefore she gathers a group of very troubled dudes, each of them with a different psycho-gift (like, um, pre-cogs and the likes...) and brings them to the house. Shape-shifting rooms, the ever-changing geography of the house, even killer bees - you get all this, eventually, and I know it sounds pretty cool but the main problem is that it takes about two hours to get to this point and you’d probably be already so sick of the annoying characters that you would have trouble to care whether they’re still alive or already strangled by a female zombie (looking like ET’s scarier sister, by the way).
The good stuff? Yeah, it’s also here: the house looks cool and placing it in the very centre of Seattle adds to the grotesque atmosphere of the movie, where the normality is literally around the corner (or: behind the gates of the mansion) and yet cannot be reached. What else... The fat guy – the one who sees scary things in his fridge but gives no shit – is an ‘interesting’ figure; but probably more so thanks to the OTT Matt Ross, who plays the role with a constant disgust on his face, than to King’s script... and be sure to realise that ‘interesting’ means, in this case, ‘interesting and annoying in equal measure’. Probably one could also argue that the ending ain’t as bad as most other horror endings these days, because you can’t predict who’s gonna get out of the house alive. But as I said before – pity that you don’t care too much who the survivors are gonna be by the time the fifth dreadful hour passes... oh yeah, did I mention it’s so damn long? It is. Even for a mini-series it’s long. Just think how it drags for a BAD long mini-series!
So, to sum it all up somehow: at the start I hoped for a movie that’s at least better than Stephen King’s Storm Of The Century; seemed possible, dammit: Nancy Travis looked sexy, Julian Sands looked amused by his role just like he did in Warlock, the many characters (a young autistic girl, a young ‘ungifted’ girl, a young ‘ungifted’ man, a middle-aged man, a middle-aged woman, an older woman, an older man... – and there’s MORE!) promised a plot similar to King’s best (The Stand, It...). But it soon appeared that Nancy throws her sexiness away as the movie moves forward, Julian’s cheesiness is completely unused and the idea of multiple characters only works in the books where King has enough space to make each of them believable and interesting. So, no: Storm Of The Century SHINES in comparison to Rose Red. If you’re brave enough to still go and rent the movie, though, please watch the dreadful opening (wooden acting at its most timbery plus cardboard ‘stones’ falling from the sky) and ask yourself whether you want to spend several hours with a movie that’s almost as bad as this first scene.
DIRECTOR: Craig R. Baxley
CAST: Nancy Travis, Matt Keeslar, Julian Sands, Matt Ross, Kimberly J. Brown
GRADE: 2/10
‘Can you please write the most terrifying haunted house story for us?’ is what the producers of Rose Red asked Stephen King. He thought he could do it, I guess – after all, he’s the master of all things terrifying. But, let’s be honest here, Rose Red ain’t this promised masterpiece of fright; it’s not WITHOUT scares exactly, but they’re all drowned in the sauce prepared from some rather stale ingredients (cliched characters, TV-quality special effects and predictable plot), while the lack of both suspense and good mystery doesn’t help us care for the outcome.
What King must have thought would be enough to call it ‘the greatest haunted house story ever’ unwinds more or less like that: a young woman, normally teaching about the supernatural, decides to carry out an experiment with a house that used to be a LAIR of the supernatural (people lost their lives there, obviously) but is now supposed to be a, uh, ‘dead cell’; the woman wants to wake this dead cell up and therefore she gathers a group of very troubled dudes, each of them with a different psycho-gift (like, um, pre-cogs and the likes...) and brings them to the house. Shape-shifting rooms, the ever-changing geography of the house, even killer bees - you get all this, eventually, and I know it sounds pretty cool but the main problem is that it takes about two hours to get to this point and you’d probably be already so sick of the annoying characters that you would have trouble to care whether they’re still alive or already strangled by a female zombie (looking like ET’s scarier sister, by the way).
The good stuff? Yeah, it’s also here: the house looks cool and placing it in the very centre of Seattle adds to the grotesque atmosphere of the movie, where the normality is literally around the corner (or: behind the gates of the mansion) and yet cannot be reached. What else... The fat guy – the one who sees scary things in his fridge but gives no shit – is an ‘interesting’ figure; but probably more so thanks to the OTT Matt Ross, who plays the role with a constant disgust on his face, than to King’s script... and be sure to realise that ‘interesting’ means, in this case, ‘interesting and annoying in equal measure’. Probably one could also argue that the ending ain’t as bad as most other horror endings these days, because you can’t predict who’s gonna get out of the house alive. But as I said before – pity that you don’t care too much who the survivors are gonna be by the time the fifth dreadful hour passes... oh yeah, did I mention it’s so damn long? It is. Even for a mini-series it’s long. Just think how it drags for a BAD long mini-series!
So, to sum it all up somehow: at the start I hoped for a movie that’s at least better than Stephen King’s Storm Of The Century; seemed possible, dammit: Nancy Travis looked sexy, Julian Sands looked amused by his role just like he did in Warlock, the many characters (a young autistic girl, a young ‘ungifted’ girl, a young ‘ungifted’ man, a middle-aged man, a middle-aged woman, an older woman, an older man... – and there’s MORE!) promised a plot similar to King’s best (The Stand, It...). But it soon appeared that Nancy throws her sexiness away as the movie moves forward, Julian’s cheesiness is completely unused and the idea of multiple characters only works in the books where King has enough space to make each of them believable and interesting. So, no: Storm Of The Century SHINES in comparison to Rose Red. If you’re brave enough to still go and rent the movie, though, please watch the dreadful opening (wooden acting at its most timbery plus cardboard ‘stones’ falling from the sky) and ask yourself whether you want to spend several hours with a movie that’s almost as bad as this first scene.
