Rose Red

Sure, there are some bona fide jolts and creepy moments but overall in "Rose Red" there's a small smattering of surprise. [25 Jan 2002]

But the payoff is too long in coming. Much of the third night involves - what else? - wandering around the ever-growing mansion. You get the feeling the characters are biding their time between commercials. King should have been advised to cut the miniseries by a night. Instead, watching "Rose Red" is like hanging out in a Halloween haunted house too long. After a while, you know somebody - or something - is going to pop out to try and scare you. By then, though, you've reached your fright limit and you're just too numb to jump. [27 Jan 2002, p.L7]

Two nights might have worked better for this series, but if noises at night make you jump, "Stephen King's Rose Red" will give you a decent dose of the heebie-jeebies. [27 Jan 2002]

A six-hour haunted house tale that tugs out every tired trick in the Boo! book, trying to scare you silly. Don't say we didn't warn you, if you're silly enough to watch all that. [27 Jan 2002]

Plays like a motley medley of the grand exalted ghost buster's greatest hits. It's a fright night festival of tepid chills and only moderate thrills, a haunted house miniseries that drags on for three nights. [27 Jan 2002, p.1F]

"Rose Red delivers a better story than his last opus (1999's "Storm of the Century") with better developed characters, but at the end I still felt like I'd wasted a lot of time. What's the point in setting up an intriguing, intricate backstory without offering some answers?

The bad news is that in true King fashion the mini series is about three hours longer than it needs to be. Somebody throw King to a newspaper editor. They decapitate copy at will! (Now that’s real horror.)