Rose Red (2002)

Stephen King has produced pages and more pages of the purest crap. Rose Red is proof of that. A psychologist/researcher wants to prove that the paranormal is real. She is risking everything even her career to accomplish it.So she assembles a team of people who have every type of ESP power to investigate a haunted house.The funny thing is that one of the members of her team is an autistic girl with extremely powerful telekinetic powers... and every other member of the team has some sort of ESP power too.Wouldn't it be smarter, safer, less expensive to take the autistic girl (and/or the other members of her team) and examine such girl and her powers instead of risking the lives of a bunch of ESP people in a ghost hunt inside a evil and malignant house?This is a pretty dumb way to start a story. Everything after that falls apart.This is for low IQ people only, or those folks who do not care about plots holes the size of Texas.

Most viewers with a penchant for haunted house stories will see the parallels between Rose Red and The Haunting of Hill House and there are many. It's no coincidence. King set out to rewrite the novel for the screen and during it's genesis it motives into Rose Red. Basically, King's screenplay replaces a lot of the subtlety ofJackson's story with a few by-numbers boo! Scares and guess what - oooh, a creepy kid that doesn't say much. I'm not saying I didn't have fun with Rose Red but it has none of the depth or ambiguity of Robert Wise's The Haunting. You can't replace dread and genuine unease with an unholy stack of cheap CGI. What I found really funny though was the fact that one reviewer here said they preferred the Jan de Bont film. Thats the best laugh I've had all week.

There is nothing new here.We have all seen this before in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist A team of psychics plan to investigate a mansion known as Rose Red of former owner Ellen Rimbauer and try to uncover the mysterious deaths and disappearances which occurred there.The CGI special effects are good. But the plot and poor scripting make the film a bore for a 4 hour sitting. There is no suspense at all.The only good actor involved is Julian Sands (of Warlock fame). The other actors performance is mediocre at best.A director similar in stature to Kubrick or Hitchcock could have made this a better film.Better watch 1408 directed by Mikael Håfström than this film.

You want a movie that is entertaining, with never a dull moment, scary, beautiful scenery, very lovable characters, a genius writer, and with a quality "you shouldn't miss" movie? I tell you right now: stop searching because you have found your one! I never enjoyed a movie that takes so much time but this one, I wouldn't have missed a single second of it even if it took like 10 hours. The movie is amazing and no matter how thirsty you are for the horror if you happened to be a horror fan, you would still enjoy all the "un-horror" scenes! The movie succeeds in getting you falling in love with the mansion just like the character of Joyce and you find yourself without knowing thirsty to know more about the mansion and its owners who have some air of mysteriousness about them. Wow, every time Joyce told her team a new single piece of information about the history of the mansion, I craved for more.And the characters, oh my God they're all amazing with the funny Emry and his mom. There were scary scenes in the movie that I understood so much. The scenes where the characters get lost whenever they try to come down the stairs as the house changed and they didn't know their way back, I used to have similar dreams where I am in the middle of a road or an area that I know quite well and suddenly it changes and I get lost. It's really scary.A very decent movie but then again behind it is the genius Stephen King.