Title: Rose Red; (Storm of the Century below) |
Release Date: 2002 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 300 minutes, 6 segments |
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Distributor and Production Company: |
Director; Writer: Crig Baxley |
Producer: Stephen King |
Cast: Nancy Travis, MattKesslar, Kimberly Brown, David Dukes, Judith Ivey, Melanie Lynsky, Matt Ross, Julian Sands, Kevin Tighe |
Technical: made for TV; video |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: |
Review: Stephen King’s Rose Red is a second gothic novel miniseries, in the spirit of the earlier Storm of the Century (below). The setup involves a rather self-centered psychology professor who risks her tenure to camp out in a gothic mansion, Rose Red, to discover and publish “the truth” about the paranormal (and become famous for life). Well, the paranormal does “exist,” and it takes a lot out of everyone who visits. It kind of encapsulates the women, kills some of the men, and turns people into vampires, the “undead,” ghosts, or whatever. (Remember Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.) Are some houses just “born bad”? An autistic child helps unmask the secret. The perspective of the house in downtown Seattle looks a bit overdone, and kind of like a kid’s drawing. Well, it’s not producing revenue, and it will be torn down for condos. The film seems claustrophobic and choppy, without the narrative hook and mystery of King’s earlier “Perfect Storm.” Movie Review;
Storm of the Century (1999);
Well, folks, what is Stephen King up to? Upstaging a youthful Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm? One week after airing this show, Cape Cod. Mass. really did have a February "Storm of the Century," after a record La Nina mild winter. Of course, there were other such storms, such as in March 1993 and January 1996. Colm Feore plays an extremely effective, peripatetic villain, something like the Stieb character from Clive Barker's novel Sacrament. At his williest, he is like a kid who's got the gimme's. Over and over, smeared in blood on latrine walls, and computer screens in the Little Tall Island lighthouse, is the ultimate slogan: GIVE ME WHAT I WANT, Scout's honor!! Imagine this coming from a Java applet in a computer class demonstrating computer winsocket connectivity. It's happened! King teaches us by repetition. "Hell is repetition." And has anybody ever told you to just "go away," or you'll be seen as creepy and maybe as attempting sexual harassment? That's happened to me. And what does He want? Well, it reminds me of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby. Is God dead? Would "unbelieving" grownups give one of their children to the Devil to save themselves? The history lesson about Roanaoke Island, N.C. is interesting. A whole colony really did disappear around 1585. Therefore, U.S. History as usually taught began at Jamestown, Va. In 1607. Not too far from Williamsburg, where I would have my personal debacle. As for the ending, I would have preferred that a Nor-easter tidal wave wash away Little Tall Island and all its sinful residents. Furthermore, a tidal wave would have melted all the snow at once. There's nothing so unaesthetic as rain on the snow, but that would make another horror novel. The Stand (1995, Republic Pictures/ The Langoliers (1995,
Artisan, dir. Tom Holland, 180 min) was aired as a two-part TV series, a
creepy thriller about a West-to-East coast-to-coast plane ride that enters
into a time warp and most people disappear. It seems that the plane fell
behind “time” in some kind of astronomical anomaly. The plane arrives at On Desperation (2006, The Shining (1980, Warner Bros., dir. Stanley Kubrick, 119 min, R) is one of Stephen King’s most famous film adaptations. Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, who takes a job caretaking an old hotel for the winter and holes up with his family. His son starts to find the demons. Remember the bloody bathtub scenes, and the wonderful maze. The Dark Half (1993, Orion / Children of the Corn (1984, New World, dir. Fritz Kiersch), based on King’s short story, has the horrific premise of children being goaded to murder all the grownups by a boy preacher. The film created a franchise of six films up through 1998. There is a lot of symbolism related to Mayan and other agricultural society sacrifices; compare to Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home. The
Mist (2007,
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