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(More customer reviews)Sometimes I am blithely unobservant. Arriving at the decision to see Rose Red based on one of those AI recommendation machines, I never noticed that it was 1) by Stephen King, and 2) the four hour version of a television special. In retrospect, I'm really not sure why I decided to see it, since haunted house horror movies generally don't grab me. But I did, and after a moment of shocked realization discovered that I was having fun watching it.
The story isn't anything spectacularly original. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis), a parapsychology teacher, bets her entire career on the possibility of finding measurable psychic phenomena at an eerie old mansion (Rose Red) in the heart of Seattle. Said mansion has a long history of eating people, and Reardon's plan is to invite a selection of psychics to spend a weekend at the house in order to wake it from a dormant state. Her ace in the hole is Annie Wheaton (Kimberly Brown), an autistic 15 year old who is an industrial strength tele-everything.
Sure enough, the house wakes up, fingers get lopped off, people drown, and a whole host of equally nasty things start to happen. As the mysteries about the house begin to unravel, things get even worse and it becomes clear that Rose Red has no intention of letting anyone go. From that point on it is a pure battle for survival.
The house is the real star of the film. It is huge, full of weird rooms and interconnected hallways, and has a knack for rebuilding and changing itself. CBS went all out to make it a spooky masterpiece, and they did a good job of it. It's the kind of nightmare that you really would like to visit. Think of it as a haunted theme park and you have the atmosphere.
Acting varies, but is generally decent. I'm not sure about Nancy Travis though. She makes Joyce on of those sublimely irritating characters that you start out sympathizing with and wind up hoping she gets his with an axe. No such luck. Julian Sands and Matt Ross are brilliant and everyone else has moments of greatness.
So I likes the show after all. Since it's made for TV, don't expect a lot of gore or out and out violence. The film starts a bit slowly, but the upside of that is that king spends as much time on character development as he does on plot twists. While this isn't a masterpiece, it's worth watching on a lazy Saturday afternoon with buckets of popcorn.
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