ROSE RED (2002) No relation to Rose Madder Wow. It just doesn't get more boring than this, the most boring miniseries ever! Well, it's the most boring I've seen, and I've seen a few. Which makes me sad, because the team of Stephen King and Craig R. Baxley was also responsible for Storm Of The Century, which was a little long but I liked it. This? Cut down to an hour, it'd still be more than a little long. Rose Red oozes along for over four hours (without commercials) in a tale of a haunted house on the edge of downtown Seattle which is observed from within for a few days by a team of psychic researchers. Nancy Travis plays team head Joyce Reardon (and "psychology of the unseen world" professor...only in Washington state), who seems all right at first but then gets bitchy and even crazy at points, like when she rubs blood all over the face of that lousy Dean. Joyce needs to find convincing and irrefutable proof that her line of research isn't a total joke in order to get her job back from the douchebag Dean, who's kind of like a refugee from an 80's frat-boy movie. Her team consists of a bunch of misfits and Julian Sands, who easily settles into the material and has a reassuring presence while everybody else seems a little fruitcakey. And her boyfriend, who just happens to own the house (when he asks early on if she'd still be interested in him if he didn't own the house, one cannot help but guffaw). About half of the psychics scarcely register at all - I didn't even notice the pretty one had disappeared until she showed up again as a rotting ghost, and the one who specializes in "automatic writing" doesn't actually get to do it until about fifteen minutes from the end. I don't even remember what the old man's psychic power was supposed to be. They all have their unique talents, except their talents usually add up to the standard psychic-link shit of blubbering on about how there was once great power here and we should not have disturbed this place, blah blah blah. Only Matt Ross as a bitter, mouth-breathing mama's boy is much of a realized character, and he's impossible to like. Also on the team is a teenaged psychic who can't quite control her powers and at two points calls a rain of stones down from the sky...hey, that sounds kinda familiar. Difference here is, she's isn't just socially retarded, she's autistic - which adds up to the same thing in movies like this, doesn't it? And I'm still not forgiving King for the "rocks from the sky" shit - I questioned it in the Carrie miniseries and if I'd remembered that far back I'd question it in the novel too. Where are these stones supposed to be coming from? Rose Red's chief problem: it's WAY too long. It's a three-part miniseries, and there's about enough material here for maybe one episode of the X-Files. Stephen King does tend to bloat his stories well beyond necessity, but at least he usually fills the gaps with personality and a familiarizing sense of character. Here? There's a half-hour sequence in the first part which takes place in a lecture theatre, where Joyce and her boyfriend give us the decades-old backstory behind the house. It's a very long half hour - and it doesn't even end there, because they continue to give us nuggets of flashback-assisted backstory for the rest of the show. They don't even get into the house until the first third is over. It's not that King has stretched himself too far beyond his capabilities (though this is all so urban, so...West coast), he's long been familiar with these spooky-story ingredients. Hell, he recycles his own work throughout - the setting precludes the usual inter-story Maine references but even casual King fans will find themselves picking up on many things King's done before. Better. Once we get in there, we see that the house is really nothing special, its spooky denizens nothing special, their motives nothing special. It doesn't even really do anything special - doors slam, whispering noises are heard, ghosts of little girls recite nursery rhymes, light bulbs go pop, walking corpses try to be seductive...all the standard shit you get in every haunted house movie is here. When you see all those statues with closed eyes, you know at least one is going to open them. When you see the suit of armor with the halberd, you know it's gonna get up, walk around and axe somebody. And when you see the greenhouse full of dead vines, you know it's all going to come back to life - and unsurprisingly, this is facilitated by the powers of the autistic girl. Making plants grow = girly superpower #1. The house is dull; the people are dull and stupid, persisting in wandering off on their own for tea even though it's been well established that the house has been eating the cast. These people bring in all sorts of psychic monitoring equipment, and while we get to see the "People Proximity Counter" go up, up, past the number of people obviously in the room, way up into the 70's and beyond, the characters never look at these things after they're set up. King's inevitable cameo is one of his most humbling, and is a brief spark of life in the film. On the subject of the girl's powers - throughout the miniseries we see her freeze her sprinkler system into great towers of ice, pulverize houses with rocks from the sky, make a dead greenhouse come to life, make a flower into a gramophone speaker, levitate dominoes...I might guess that not all of these are reproducible every time but she sure can start and stop her record player whenever she wants to, with nothing more than her mind. She's plenty of validation for Joyce's career path right there - why bother with the house? I can take watching lifeless idiots stumbling around a middling movie for ninety minutes, but four hours? When this was over, I felt like I'd just escaped from Hell. Storm Of The Century, for its many (padding) faults, had watchable heroes, a somewhat compelling villain (Colm Feore can make just about anything work, but I never did see Trudeau), and it looked good. This? Same creative team, and a few more years for the effects to develop...what happened? I bet it started with Stephen King somehow being convinced to write another teleplay. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE