Catharina_Sweden This movie was fairly entertaining for want of anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon, but as everything by Stephen King it had no depth - and it is not one of his best works either.Firstly, it was much too long. You cannot stretch out a haunted house movie for over four hours, because the viewers get used to the scary things in it. For instance, the two old female inhabitants who have stayed on in the house as ghosts, look really creepy the first and second time you see them. But the third or fourth time, you have become "friends" with them..! And then there became too many dead people who turned into ghosts, to be shocking or even interesting anymore...IF you want to write a whole miniseries about a haunted house, I think there must be some other strong storyline as well, apart from the haunting. For instance a treasure hunt or a love story.Secondly, the movie is so obviously a plagiarism of "The Haunting" from 1963, and also the remake from 1999. The similarities simply are too many for them to be coincidences.Thirdly, and worst, was the high piano music and/or "creepy sounds" almost throughout the whole movie. It was so loud, that it was very difficult to hear what the actors were saying - I had to try to read their lips! But I wonder if this mistake can really have been possible in the original - it seems incredible! Maybe someone has manipulated my copy of it (I downloaded it from the internet).Fourthly, it did not have any really good scares. Not the kind that make you jump, when you suddenly see something horrible. Many times the music etc. seemed to build up to this kind of scare - but one was always disappointed by what one really saw. As so often with Stephen King, the scares were more unpleasant and gory than those "pure and high" scares in old Gothic ghost stories - that I think are the ideal in horror..!I will remember two scenes from this movie though, because they were very funny. Firstly, the "nerd" who (in the beginning) was quite indifferent to the powers who tried to scare him off, and just told them "try doing that to someone who isn't broke". (Because he needed the money he would get for taking part too much to care about anything else.) And secondly the very last pictures, when Joyce, the career-hungry, female researcher who had led them all into the mess and then died in the house herself in the end, was herself one of the ghosts in the haunted house - and obviously had resigned to her fate. Of some reason I thought this very funny - maybe because I have known some ruthless career women just like her..!

zfiany You want a movie that is entertaining, with never a dull moment, scary, beautiful scenery, very lovable characters, a genius writer, and with a quality "you shouldn't miss" movie? I tell you right now: stop searching because you have found your one! I never enjoyed a movie that takes so much time but this one, I wouldn't have missed a single second of it even if it took like 10 hours. The movie is amazing and no matter how thirsty you are for the horror if you happened to be a horror fan, you would still enjoy all the "un-horror" scenes! The movie succeeds in getting you falling in love with the mansion just like the character of Joyce and you find yourself without knowing thirsty to know more about the mansion and its owners who have some air of mysteriousness about them. Wow, every time Joyce told her team a new single piece of information about the history of the mansion, I craved for more.And the characters, oh my God they're all amazing with the funny Emry and his mom. There were scary scenes in the movie that I understood so much. The scenes where the characters get lost whenever they try to come down the stairs as the house changed and they didn't know their way back, I used to have similar dreams where I am in the middle of a road or an area that I know quite well and suddenly it changes and I get lost. It's really scary.A very decent movie but then again behind it is the genius Stephen King.

Sanpaco13 This was like The Shining meets The Haunting. I really enjoyed this miniseries in which a group of psychics enter an old mansion said to have been haunted, in hopes of sparking some new psychic events and capturing it or science. Very soon however, people start to die and go crazy and the survivors become trapped inside the house. The house actually becomes the main protagonist in this tale in that it has the ability to shift and change its structure, and uses this to lure its victims right where it wants to. For about four hours of viewing time I was literally riveted into the story, wondering who would be killed next and who was going to eventually escape. I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys a good haunted house movie. 10 out of 10.

buzzerbill At his best, Stephen King has good ideas and writes excruciatingly bad prose. And even the good ideas vanish in the translation to the screen. In my experience, there are only two good movies made from King's books--Christine and The Dead Zone (The Shining is Kubrick's biggest disappointment.) Rose Red is the worst haunted house film I have ever seen, and in the top 1% of worst movies I have ever seen. Gregory, the infallible movie cat, who normally responds to bad films with a disdainful sniff and a malodorous trip to the litter box, nearly made the same comment in from of the television about 10 minutes into the second segment.Where oh where can we start? Let's start with the special effects, if only to dismiss them. Pretty as they are, they dress up a pig. And as we all should know, you can dress up a big, put lipstick on her, and call her Monique--but she is still a pig. No bad film was ever made good with special effects--and this turkey is a prime example.How about the cast? On the whole pretty good, with a couple of veterans like Judith Ivey and Julian Sands, both of whom are capable of enlivening a film. Not here.And now, the plot. Oh, the plot. What a dreadful mess. First of all, it's a mishmash of elements from far better work. The house that's alive and malignant? And the experiment with psychics? Look no further than the best of all haunted house movies, the original version of The Haunting (not the remake!). Even King used it before in The Shining. The child medium? Firestarter, and any of a dozen different films and movies. And The Haunting did more in two hours than this in well over four.And why? To begin with, everything, including the kitchen sink and all the the plumbing, has been tossed in, with decidedly ill effect. We have academic politics. We have a mad scientist in Nancy Travis's character, who is so annoying that it's a wonder that the rest of the investigators didn't roll her up in a carpet and jump up and down, up and down, crushing her like Nero did Poppea. For heaven's sake, we even have a nerd with a neurotic smothering mother--a veritable field day for Freud.And what is worse--far far worse--is that the whole preposterous farrago makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER. Why does writing "Open the doors" 100 times open the doors? If the house is the evil entity, why does its influence extend far the house. And, for that matter, given the aerial shots of the house in the middle of downtown Seattle, where the devil is all the open space in which characters keep getting lost? And we do not get to see the house blown up at the end? A terrible cheat-perhaps the SFX budget ran out. And, to cap it all, the dialogue is written--and delivered (with a few exceptions) in a fever pitch of hysteria that heightens the overall sense of--well, confusion is perhaps the kindest word for it.Four hours on DVD, six on television with breaks. For heaven's sake, save yourself time and brain cells. Rent a good film like the original version of The Haunting or The Uninvited (Ruth Hussy, Ray Milland.) Why anyone watches this festering heap of poo is beyond me.