Diagonaldi Very well executed

BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

geocapital This is a typical paranormal activity movie: The characters act like idiots, making always the worst choice (like going alone somewhere), most of the paranormal things do not happen on screen, characters die one by one (although they do stay longer in this 4-hour mini series) and you can't even understand why these characters are there in the first place, music that you would never listen by itself (it feels strange that the OST seems to have been released as a double album) and a whole stage and acting that offers more laughs than its parody could ever do. So, the story is about a mentally problematic "psychology" professor who is also a fond fan of paranormal activity. Trying to boost her career, she decides to go and collect some "hard" data (hahahaha) to prove to her boss and the psychology scientific community that paranormal activity is real. The place for that is a mansion belonging to her boyfriend and is supposed to be haunted. Because of numerous deaths, the place was left empty for many years and is considered to be sleeping... For reasons unknown, the "scientist" believes that the house will wake up thanks to a group of other paranormal crazees that she is actually paying to go to the house with her and especially a telekinetic teenager that seems to be special among the rest (we don't know why). Although each of the members seems to have a special talent (a special move if you are a gamer), they barely seem to need it as any random guy could act the same way in that house. So, this professor takes all the expensive equipment of the university (telemetric... hahaha) and goes to collect some hard data. These equipment include a camera and a machine that measures temperature (called thermometer) and how many people are in the room (and despite the number being larger than the actual people, it still doesn't make a difference in the story). After they move in and before setting the equipment, they go on a tour. Although a lot of the paranormal activity happens during this tour (like the screaming room), they don't record anything, and the prof continues the tour like nothing happened. Later on, when more paranormal things happen, the same professor who was so adamant that there is paranormal activity, appears to ignore it and get even crazier forgetting the reason she went there in the first place. Maybe at the end, we understand why... Anyway, to tell the truth, if you like this kind of movies, you will have some pleasant time, with some nice laughs when you know what is going to happen (and it does!). But it's a terribly long movie, with very slow development and these boring scenic gaps fitted for TV shows. Anyway, I'd better go change my underwear for the fifth time. Still half an hour to go.

mauro volvox 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.

sjrobb99-997-836393 To get the obvious parallel out of the way: yes, the plot of "Rose Red" is a LOT like "The Haunting of Hill House". The basic elements are all there: a creepy old house where "something awful" happened long ago, a slightly obsessive paranormal investigator, a group of psychic volunteers--one of them an innocent conduit meant to 'awaken' the house--an heir looking to turn a quick buck on a dubious inheritance...check, check, and check. The differences, however, throw the whole thing off-kilter enough that "Rose Red" works on its own. Notwithstanding some laughable special effects and a few performances hammy enough to be served for Easter dinner, this is a series worth watching. Rose Red, the ancestral home of the Rimbauer family, was cursed from the beginning (a natural consequence of having been built atop that haunted house chestnut: an ancient Indian burial ground). Ellen Rimbauer, the widow of the builder, led a miserable and emotionally stunted life. To escape from her misery, she dabbled in the occult and eventually died in the house along with her daughter, April, her maid/lover/familiar, Sukeena, and various other visitors. After Ellen's death, tour groups paid to go through the house...but the tour groups kept coming up short one member at the end. The house has been abandoned for many years. Enter Professor Joyce Reardon (toothily played by Nancy Travis), a psychologist with an obsessive bent toward the paranormal. Threatened with the loss of her university position--presumably for being a bitchy crackpot--she is determined to prove her theories by turning Rose Red into an Island of Misfit Psychic Toys: nervously religious Cathy (Judith Ivey), shrill, sniveling Emery (Matt Ross), phlegmatic Vic (Kevin Tighe), tentative Pam (Emily Deschanel), suave and calming Nick (Julian Sands), and autistic Annie (Kimberly J. Brown) who is the aforementioned psychic conduit. Annie's sister, Rachel,(Melanie Lynskey) comes along to care for Annie during the experiment but has no psychic powers. Neither does Steve Rimbauer (Matt Keesler), the remaining Rimbauer heir--who happens to be schtupping Dr. Reardon and is happy to let her use the house to regain her professional footing.The series veers from the predictable (lengthening hallways, breathing walls, a sinister doll-house) to the grotesquely sublime (the demise and reappearance of several members of the party, all of them looking sly and pale and miserably, gloriously dead when they shuffle back on-stage). A few performances fall magnificently, headlong into caricature, most notably Emery, who is so disgustingly whiny and unlikable that he calls to mind Franklin, the vile, wheelchair-bound younger brother of Sally in "Texas Chainsaw Massacre". When Emery's neurotically overprotective mother Kay (Laura Kenny) shows up and begins gnawing at the scenery, the whole thing threatens to degenerate into cartoonishness...but the cast manages to pull it out and and give the viewer the genuinely creepy impression that the relationship between Emery and his mother is the unhealthiest thing in the house at that moment--given the stuff going on in Rose Red, that's saying something.One central performance left me unsatisfied: Kimberly J. Brown, as the autistic psychic Annie, relies pretty heavily on theatrically portentous looks and the constant ghostly background noise of Annie's favorite song, "Theme from A Summer Place". There's no Rain Man virtuosity at work here, just a lot of dull staring off into the distance. At the end of the series, when Annie begins to speak, her laughably fake stammer fails utterly to convey the wonder of a non-verbal autistic person talking for the first time. You get the feeling she is not so much autistic as just backward and bratty. Melanie Lynsky's Rachel manages to be believably terrified of, and protective over, Annie--but Annie and Rachel's mother and father, who show up briefly, are so ham-handed in their effort to be BAD PEOPLE that they might have stepped straight out of an After-School Special about abusive parents. Several reviewers have mentioned that the end of the movie, when all of the ghosts in the house close in on Dr. Reardon to make her a permanent resident of Rose Red, left them cold. I have to disagree. Dr. Reardon is cheerfully unlikable from the very beginning, with a toothy smile that never quite reaches her eyes and the shifty instincts of a nutria rat. I had no trouble believing that her increasingly manic efforts to control the people, the experiment, and ultimately Rose Red itself came from her own personality. She was not infected by the house; the house recognized her as a kindred spirit. The house knew she was awful and set her up for a brutal finish. The ghosts who take her down include Nick, Cathy, and Vic--all of whom died because she refused to listen to reason about how dangerous the house really was. The very last scene, where ghost-Joyce gazes smugly out the attic window, is both totally predictable, and totally eerie and unsettling in the best possible way. Yes, the movie is derivative, but it has some terribly effective moments. Ultimately it's satisfying and rich in the guilty way of eating something delicious that you know is not good for you.

MubukuGrappa First thing first: This "movie" is awful.Statutory Warning: Watching this may cause nausea, suffocation, self-loathing, regret, worthlessness, self-hatred, and other such symptoms.I watched many Mad TV skits making fun of stereotypical movies and TV shows, as well as many Hustler XXX video parodies of TV series. This excuse of a movie ()or TV series or whatever could have possibly been watchable as either of those, but as a full-length feature, this is absolutely horrible stuff! Horribly bad acting, never-ending story, pathetic dialogs, an exercise in triviality. Even before the trip begins, I could predict who all people will die, and who would possibly survive. My prediction was wrong only in the case of the heir; all others that I predicted would die, did die. My guess regarding the survivors also was correct.Does that mean that I'm a genius? Hell, no. I am just a lonely loser, who watched huge number of such trash, and so there is nothing even remotely new or unique about such work.This was torture porn for me. I mean, I was invited for a dinner at a colleague's place, and since I ran out on excuses (I had declined 2-3 earlier such invitations), I had to go. Her and mine tastes in films are mutually exclusive, and so when I arrived there and this movie was playing, I was rather sure that I was there for 90 minutes of pain and agony.I was wrong! I was to be tortured for 4 hours or so by a meaningless, painfully bad excuse of a movie. This movie is so bad that it does not even qualify for "so bad that it is good" category. It's like how Tyler Perry would make Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I mean, why else would Nancy Travis be trying so hard to look and act serious in her role, while she possibly knew that she was the absolute wrong choice for it? Imagine, for example, Marlon Wayans, trying to act a Marlon Brando. That is what I am talking about.To make matters worse, I was surrounded by 3 enthusiastic people determined to watch it till the finis (even when I reminded that it would drag until 1-30 AM), and my colleague, the host, kept on mentioning how this was originally made as a TV documentary. Yes, she used the word "documentary", really. If this is documentary, then I am Rockefeller.I've nothing good to say about this movie or whatever, except for the fact that the food was good; she really cooked well. I lost 4 hours of my lie, and a Saturday evening watching this. I could have much more enjoyed sitting in my apartment all alone drinking cheap wine and watching COPS and Cheaters and all that trash!