Steven King off his meds

I’m watching Steven King’s Rose Red. It was a miniseries at some point. Want to see 4 hours of unmitigated crap? The director seems to miss almost every opportunity for horror, and instead puts supposedly scary parts exactly where you would expect them with a long lead in so that nothing is at all shocking. I guess the director wanted to avoid all the schlocky scare setups so common in trendy horror flicks that he avoided being scary all together. Rose Red is a haunted house movie. If you want to avoid schlock, you picked the wrong subject matter. The only truly horrific part is the absolute mess of a script.

The ghosts that appear never seem to have motive or a clear agenda. Do the ghosts want the living humans to leave? Do the ghosts want them to stay? The ghosts are easy to beat. Every time a character has told the ghost to be gone, they leave. One called on Jesus, others just said “Leave me alone!” The ghosts get scared when a living human says “Boo!”

The nadir occurred when all the characters were standing around and saw a luminescent cloud in the room. One girl walked up to it. “No, don’t!” “Get away from that!” “Stop!” “Don’t touch it!” She touches the mist thing. She gets throttled. Didn’t see that coming! Eventually, one smart guy just threw something and the cloud disappeared. Yeah, that’s all it took.

The most basic of horror flick rules: “Don’t go off by yourself!”
“I’m just going to get some iced tea from the kitchen.”
“No, don’t go off by yourself.”
“I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Three people just died going off by themselves, but I suppose it would be alright if it’s just for a minute.” Well, wouldn’t you know, that lady went off, got whacked, and didn’t even get her iced tea.

Next horror flick big mistake – a guy finds a hammer, but then leaves it. Can you get any more cliché? Yes, you can, and they do. Some guy sees dead people (go ahead and say it “I see dead people!”), but when he blinks, the ghosts go away. Yes, terribly scary. Oh, my. Every time it happens, this guy gets worked up even more about it, in juxtaposition to the viewer, who rapidly begins to care less.

There’s this skeevey photographer guy was killed at least twice. Then he’s back for thirds. “Hey, wasn’t that guy dead already?”

Anyway, I’m not completely finished with this piece of trash, but there is no possible ending that could bring it to a finale that makes sense. At this point, I’m certain the house blows up, as any good haunted house must. I’m rooting for it to take out as many of these bad actors as possible before it goes, to spare us all future lessons in what not to do when you are confronted with visitors from beyond the grave.