Rose Red Review

I'm a little confused about the plot of "Rose Red." These people get invited to a haunted house famous for killing and vanishing the people who go inside. They go "oh, okay," and when there are actual ghosts inside and plenty of evidence that at least one person is already dead, they don't really freak out that much.

Two people dead and the house is starting to mindfuck us all? Meh, no big deal, let's ignore the psychic rumblings and make pancakes.

Three people dead? Fingers getting cut off willy-nilly? OK, now it's time to be shocked, just shocked by what's going on, and get pissy at the crazy parapsychologist who hired us all to come because for some reason it's her fault we all left our senses of self-preservation at the door and that everything we were told would happen and knew would happen is actually happening. Sure it's been going on nonstop right under our noses since the first two minutes inside the house, but now we're surprised and terrified because the plot needs us to be.

Yeah the characters were pretty goddamned dumb, but that dumb? C'mon. Lazy writing treats the characters like generic game pieces who only exist when they're being observed and directed, and only move as far as the writer pushes them. Boring.

Emery gets points for being a genuinely believable and complex character, rather unpleasant but still sympathetic, but the rest of them are two-dimensional puppets who merely drag the haunted house story along its well-worn track.

Also, I object to every person of nonwhite heritage in the story being some form of subservient cleaning staff. Black spooky voodoo maid in a do-rag, black sad-faced maid in a do-rag, black janitor... but no black main character. No black extras, either. Couldn't the first victim of the haunted house be a minority, like in the other shitty horror movies? Was there really no room for one of King's stock mysterious magical black folks in a film about a group of mysterious psychic people?

Come to think of it, maybe Rose Red is sort of scary after all. ;)