Rose Red

Craig R. Baxley – 2002 – USA

Pretty cruddy TV mini-series based on one of Stephen King’s many gargantuan books.  As usual, whenever King himself is involved in these adaptations, it’s a total washout.  Interviewed on the DVD, he boasts that this film should be regarded as the “Moby Dick of haunted house movies.”  The magnitude of that kind of delusion is a major strike against him, because the film isn’t even deserving of humble praise by its creators, let alone that kind of out-of-control hyperbole.  And it’s even more absurd considering the fuss he made over his personally-supervised marathon version of The Shining for TV in 1997 which was intended to be an improvement over the classic Stanley Kubrick film that he’s never approved of.  In any case, Rose Red is a failure all around.  The characters and situations are all completely stock and have been handled infinitely better in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1973), John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House (written by Richard Matheson), and yes in Kubrick’s The Shining too.  Everything about this film – from its scripting to its photography to its acting to its special effects – is remarkably weak and amateurish even by made-for-TV standards.