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· Year: 2003
· Director: Craig R. Baxley
· Writer: Ridley Pearson
· Cast: Lisa Brenner, Steven Brand
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· May be the basis for a series.
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| Synopsis |
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An early twentieth-century woman trapped in a troubled marriage to an oil magnate suffers pains from this life and beyond in a haunted mansion named Rose Red.
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RATING
Out of 100 |
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46
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| COLD ANALYSIS |
| 2.25 -ATMOSPHERE |
| 0.5 -GORE |
| 0.75 -HUMOR |
| 1.0 -SCARES |
| 1.75 -TENSION |
Had I cared for The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, I might have called it a grace note to Rose Red, Stephen King's pulp nod to classic drafty haunted house tales like The Haunting of Hill House. As it is, I found Diary to be somewhat more entertaining than the book on which it's based; an afterthought, nothing more. Still, I hope its existence is an indication of ABC's continuing interest in airing adaptations of King's works, and I can only hope that more adaptations of King books are on the way. (How about Insomnia, folks? I know that a book involving the three fates, pro-life terrorism, and a septuagenarian's metaphorical third eye is inherently a hard sell, but it's a great story, and ready-made for the miniseries format.)
In my preview of Diary, I said that "a movie treatment of the story might well benefit it, condensing its romance-novel narrative into a couple of hours of creepiness and shocks." Okay, that's kind of obvious, but at least I was right. The movie version of Diary gains a tense scene or two by moving out of the book's first-person narrative, but it uses special effects, subtle though they may be, for scenes that are best left imagined. The movie is still best described as a period soap opera, and my advice is this: if you liked the book, give the movie a try. If not, give it a miss.
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