When we started the site, I told myself that Made for TV movies would remain off-limits. They are, after all, just way too easy to criticize, and I would like to think of us here at the Popcorn as being above the tearing apart of low-budget, poorly written, badly acted two-hour television sagas.
Thank God I didn’t include six hour television miniseries in that classification!
Okay, okay. Rose Red probably seems like a pretty easy target. It’s difficult to find some good horror that was made for network television nearly ten years ago. And to be perfectly honest, miniseries can be a difficult thing to pull off. Six hours is either too much or too little time to tell a good story. Keep it simple and by the second installment the audience has completely lost interest. Too intricate and it’s like an entire life history is being regurgitated within seconds. Ergo, by the second installment the audience has completely lost interest. So the thought of giving Rose Red a pass had crossed my mind. But, really, where would the fun be in that?
5. Stephen King doesn’t have the best track record with television adaptations.
Remember how good 1980’s The Shining was? Jack Nicholson was phenomenal as lead character Jack Torrance; his son Danny was beyond creepy; and those damn twins? I have trouble thinking about them to this day. Plus, the film was just over two hours long, which was nice because not only were there the typical Kubrick-esque suspenseful moments, but the story also moved forward at a decent pace. Remember, then, in 1997, when Stephen King decided he wanted to remake The Shining for television because he felt the Kubrick version strayed too far from his novel? And he had Steven Weber from Wings play the lead? And the whole thing was six hours long? And incredibly boring because it was so cerebral? Yeah, Rose Red feels a lot like that. Six hours is a long time for a movie about a haunted house. How much back story do you really need, anyway? At some point, all of those mysterious deaths taking place in the house start to look the same… and there’s a difference between reading a book and seeing it play out in all its 500 page glory on the small screen. King needs to learn how to down-size.
4. Can we stop it with the stereotyped characters already?
Look, I understand creating a good ensemble can be difficult. Characters need to complement one another, and the greater the number of people in a story, the harder it is to maintain the audience’s interest in each one of them individually. So the logical choice is to make them so completely different that there’s no chance of confusing their story lines. Which is fine, except for the fact that sometimes personality stereotypes can be mistaken for personality differences.
Case in point: Emery Waterman, played by Matt Ross. He’s overweight, nerdy, wears glasses, lives with his overprotective mother. King could have done a lot with his character. Being picked on throughout childhood definitely has a way of bringing on the emotional problems as an adult. Emery could have been creepy, emotionally disturbed, and interesting without being over-written as a sniveling, whimpering shell of a man with a crazy mother who runs around the house screaming “Emery! Emery! Emerrrryyyyy!” just because he hasn’t called her in the last 24 hours. And Annie Wheaton, the autistic fifteen year old key to unlocking the house’s psychic energy, played by Kimberly J. Brown. Just because she’s autistic doesn’t mean she has to be obsessed with dolls:
all autistic teenagers play with dolls, don't they?
King writes her as mentally unstable, to the point of serious retardation. I guess no one told him he didn’t have to assume the audience has the mental capacity of a five year old — a character doesn’t have to put herself in dangerous situations (reaching out for ghostly figures, standing on chair edges so she can touch a dollhouse encased in glass, etc.) just to prove she’s “special”.
3. When suspense ruins the horror and bad acting ruins the suspense, it’s time to rethink things.
Rose Red seems to try so hard to build suspense, any opportunity for real horror gets lost. I don’t know if it’s just the fact that the filmmakers needed to fill six hours with something that they just happened to forget to add the scary parts, but it felt as though I was caught up in a lot of wandering, a lot of story-telling, and a lot of architectural history lessons, and I missed out on the whole horror/thriller aspect of the miniseries. Plus, if you plan on making a film suspenseful, for the love of God get some decent actors to carry the story. Even Emily Deschanel, who I truly enjoy on Bones, couldn’t save this thing from disaster. Suspense requires subtlety, and if your actors are using big gestures and crazy eyes to get their points across, it tends to take one out of the experience.
2. Nancy Travis is obnoxious.
Can I just say that the lead could not have been any more horribly mis-cast? What is Nancy Travis really known for, anyway? So I Married an Axe Murderer? It was a cute film, she had a cute role, but she wasn’t the lead. And ten years later she still can’t carry a film. Travis plays Professor Joyce Reardon with an unnatural amount of force; I get that she’s supposed to be a strong female, but lowering your voice to a creepy rasping sound to prove it doesn’t make you seem powerful. It makes you seem crazy and unlikeable. Actually, I don’t think I felt any amount of empathy for her character during the entire six hours. And to sit through six hours of a film without liking the lead character in any sense is either poor writing or poor casting. Or both, which just makes Rose Red’s failure a double-whammy.
1. You’re not Alfred Hitchcock. You don’t need to make a cameo in every one of your films.
Just stop, Stephen. I don’t need to see you as the goofy pizza delivery guy, neither does anyone else.
