2 out of 5

Directed by: Craig R. Baxley

I’ve only read Stephen King’s Hard Case Crime books. From those, I have a mixed opinion of his writing, though part of that mix is seeing skill that lets me understand his superstar status, weaving expertly through a story and characters. But if I were just going off his various film / TV adaptations – of which there are enough to make some general judgments on the source materials – I’d stick with the mostly negative opinion I realize I’ve long had: that I’m not sure his stories survive past their variably chilling premises.

Of course, that King doesn’t end his stories well is a thing that I think is well voiced, even by some fans. But beyond that, so many of these adaptations crumble well before they get to their conclusion, ticking off annoyances and offenses as they drop many of the writer’s tropes into the mix: psychic kids; childhood traumas and their accompanying tropes; Indian burial grounds. He’s not the only writer using these things by any means, but he uses them a lot, and enough such that they can start to feel like lazy inclusions – like of course that kid is psychic; of course the house was built on an Indian burial ground.

And all of this carries over to his written-for-TV series, Rose Red, named after the possessed house – guess what it’s built on? – to which teacher Dr. Joyce Reardon (Nancy Travis) drags a superhero team of various psychic types (including kid Annie, played by Kimberly J. Brown) to gather proof on the existence of the supernatural, and stick it to her laughing peers.

The first 90-minute episode of this is bloated, as is the whole thing, but sticks with the stereotype: the setup is a lot of fun. It’s a little cringey visually, in the way pre-prestige TV that needed to be effects- and mood-heavy tended to be (i.e. the late 90s / early 00s), but director Craig R. Baxley does a fair job of wrangling the limitations of the era into an appreciably mysterious but cheeky tone, patient with the material and characters in a way that doesn’t force the story onto us. Yes, that’s part of the bloat, but as long as you check the runtime upfront, it’s easy to go with it, and the “gathering the team” charm, as we learn each psychic’s various “power” (precognition, post cognition, automatic writing, etc.) is fun, as is Reardon’s slavish review of the house’s history with her team, which is what consumes most of the first episode.

As a sort of telling detail on how this ultimately turns out, though, I had a kind of mixed take on that history, because I was like, “Why are the grounds on which Rose Red is built cursed? but at least it’s not because it’s on Indian burial grounds,” only to read in the wiki summary that, yeah, it is because of that, so, firstly 1. aforementioned trope, and 2. I believe I was paying attention, which suggests this detail was mentioned so casually that it didn’t register. Cue how much of the second 90-minute episode goes, during which Reardon and team start to tour the house, and Reardon keeps fussing over needing “proof” while absolutely not responding to / not reacting to the shit-tons of proof that keeps occurring while she’s there. She occasionally becomes a scientist, setting up typical psychic research stuff, and then forgets how to use any of it, and doesn’t apply any scientific method, and flip-flops between passionate protector of the psychic community and evil in-it-for-the-fame manipulator, as suits the emotional needs of the moment. A hugely talented cast of knowns and character actors play up singular traits – the annoying one! The helpful one! – for reasons that exist beyond what’s on the screen, which is an interesting idea to flesh out their motivations for being at the house, but also violates some TV / movie expectations, meaning they mostly just act like obnoxious, one-note idiots. What was the point of Emery’s (Matt Ross) eating compulsion, for example, and harping on his weight and overbearing mother?

Some good makeup effects for the house’s denizens and a lingering curiosity of where this is going (I mean, except for the more obvious Shining-influenced guess) can sustain a viewer past this thumb-twiddling – 90-minutes of repeated jump scares and “I guess I’m just seeing things” ignorance, which makes so much sense of those apparently accepting of psychic powers – to the concluding episode, which feels almost insultingly dismissive of the entire affair, completely ditching characters without ceremony, and weakly backwards justifying events in a very unsatisfying manner, that basically answers the followup to Why this house?- i.e. Why is Rose Red haunted? – with “because.” Because King wanted to write a haunted house movie, and did so, then just kind of stuffed it with the various visual ideas he wanted to see, and plotted it on what, nowadays, we might call an AI-scripted version of a Stephen King story, which is incredibly dismissive of such a storied writer, but then again… I’m not sure how well-remembered this series is, and at the very least, I think it can be agreed that it doesn’t have much that could be called unique amongst his oeuvre.