Over the past two nights I've been watching "Rose Red", a miniseries written by Stephen King that aired on ABC-TV in 2002. I saw it then and always remembered it, so a few months ago I checked to see if it was available on dvd. It was, but it had been out for a while and copies were rare, so the price was high : 55 bucks on Amazon. I kept checking and got lucky, scoring a used copy last week for just twenty dollars.
Did you see it when it was first shown? Stephen King was on a roll at the time, having scored big ratings with another miniseries, "Storm Of The Century", that was broadcast in 1999. Both "Storm" and "Rose Red" were directed by a guy named Craig R. Baxley, who did a nice, slick job on each one. Both were written by King exclusively for the small screen and were therefore not adapted from one of his books or short stories.
"Rose Red" is the name of a old mansion in Seattle that belonged to the Rimbauer family, a turn of the century clan with a sordid history. In 2002, only one Rimbauer is left, a great-grandson whose girlfriend is a college professor of parapsychology (Nancy Travis). She is so fascinated with Rose Red, that she's convinced young Rimbauer to open the house up one last time before it's scheduled demolition. Years earlier it had been available to tour groups, but after a series of, um........horrific occurrences, he closed the joint down for good. Until now. Travis has assembled a team of psychics, each with a different ability (automatic writing, pre and post cognition, mindreading and something called "touch/know"). Her secret weapon is an autistic teenager named Annie, whose telekinesis is strong enough to freeze water from a tap, or rain boulders from the sky. Travis's goal is to prove that the paranormal phenomena at Rose Red is real, and by using scientific telemetry to do so, she hopes to win academic acclaim and legitimize her field of study.
It's Stephen King, so needless to say all Hell is gonna break loose. And the characters will be well written.
Once again I won't do a blow-by-blow, especially here because this was a four and a half hour production. The most important thing I can say is that it looks fantastic. I wish it could have been shown in theaters, because it looks like a motion picture rather than a television production. Everything about the set for Rose Red is just incredible. They found a real mega-mansion in Tacoma and used it for some interiors and the main exterior, but then they also built a humongous interior set, and made extensive use of models as well. I rarely watch "making of" bonus features on a dvd, but I made a point to watch this one because the production design is so awesome.
Director Baxley does a great job of keeping the atmosphere stirring while jarring you with the visuals. There's just a ton of stuff going on over the course of 254 minutes, and "Rose Red" will bear repeated viewings. Having said that, it's more like a Disneyland E-Ticket ride of a haunted house movie than it is a quiet spinechiller like "The Innocents" or "The Uninvited". "Rose Red" is big and showy, and in that way, Baxley is like a TV Spielberg, working with King's material. The script could have been tightened here and there, maybe to build tension in places, or to develop the emergence of the phenomena, but all in all, it's damned impressive and a lot of spooky fun. The special effects are a combination of Disney-style animatronics, make-up, and early CGI, and according to the "making of" documentary they spent 40 million bucks on the movie, every dollar of which appears on screen.
"Rose Red" also has a great cast and an eerie score. You won't be able to see it on TV (so far as I know), so try to get hold of a dvd copy like I did, or just come over to The Pad and I'll play it for ya. /////
Because I am off work, I had time to squeeze in another film, an old TV Movie from 1970 called "The House That Would Not Die". Man, that would make a great double bill with "The Brain That Would Not Die". What's the deal with the refusal to die on the part of Houses and Brains? They must be pretty strong willed. Or maybe they're just being stubborn. Really, I think it has to do with the "Would Not" part of the title, and the staccato sound of the syllables when you put the entire phrase together ".......That - Would - Not - Die".
Boom-Boom-Boom-Boom. That.Would.Not.Die. Sorry to harp on it, but I think it's a genius bit of titling, because the writer (or more likely the producer, who wants to put butts in seats) is cognizant of things like the rhythmic sound of a title, as well as - for horror movies - it's bluntness and finality. So, as we talked about the "Don't" motif of the late 70s, and the "It (did this or that)" phenomenon of the 1950s, now we have another Trending Title category, albeit a minor one : the "That Would Not Die" film.
"The House That Would Not Die" was an Aaron Spelling production, before he was super famous, and you might not think of him for horror, but this was one of the scariest TV movies I've seen. It starred Barbara Stanwyck and Kitty Winn as a woman and her niece who move into an old mansion out in the country. Like Rose Red, the place has a past.
Look - I am gonna start a new movie trend, because I can't deal with people continually moving into these joints without considering the consequences. So, I'm forming my own production company. Each movie will be about a haunted house, and each will run about five to ten minutes. A couple, or a family, will show up to look at a house, the realtor will tell them it's history and they'll opt out. The house will sulk, and that will be the end of each movie.
Take that, Haunted Houses!
Well, not really. I love 'em, and you probably do too. It would be fun, though, to make just one of these Anti-Haunted House Movies and sneak it into a theater unsuspected. The audience would get a reverse shock, which might jump start our career.
Make sure to watch "The House That Would Not Die", though. It's really spooky, with a great performance from Kitty Winn, who you remember from her small part in "The Exorcist" and who then, ala Brian DePalma and Genevieve Bujold, disappeared off the face of the Earth. /////
See you in the morning. Dodgers won, whew! (sigh of relief). Eight days to go. Nothing but love.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment