Rosemarys Baby Digital

I thought this was the old version of Rosemary’s Baby. This one takes place in Paris and I couldn’t follow a lot of it. And I hate movies you have to read.

ROSEMARYS BABY - the original 1968 film version directed by Roman Polanski - was smart, stylish, sardonic, sensational and superb - all the things, indeed, that this needless remake is not. This allegedly modern retelling is, in fact, what it actually is: and that is a TV movie fatiguingly drawn out to accommodate its every-few-minutes commercial breaks - so, therefore, it is laden with all the myriad and predictable cliff-hanging moments indicative of those coming commercial breaks. Of course, there are no actual commercials during the film on this DVD - except for the irritating previews one must either watch or skip through to get to the main event - but the rapid succession of fade-to-blacks are the fingerprints of this productions primary commercial function. In short, it is dragged out and padded and instead of keeping viewers on the edge of their seat, it is equally likely to cause one to snuggle back in their seat - and possibly even doze off. It isnt that this take on Ira Levins classic is awfully bad - it just isnt terribly good. In listening to the director and star/producer Zoe Rosemary Saldana talk of their undertaking and the need to offer this day and age a newer perspective on Rosemarys character just made me laugh - for there is nothing in this vision and version of Rosemary that isnt in the character as first exquisitely embodied by Mia Farrow - and, in all honestly, there is a far amount less. Also postulated - especially by director Agnieszka Holland - is that in her version she tried to offer up not so much a horror tale, but a psychological one wherein viewers never quite know what is real or what is merely imagined by Rosemary in her eventually pregnant and possibly paranoidal state. But this is hogwash! Yes, indeed, such a perspective can be most definitely applied to the Polanski version - until the last, chilling moments. However, we see the Devil in the first few minutes in Hollands film. We also are privy to a series of gratuitously violent rub-outs of various characters who get too close to the truth of the very-real witchery involved. And this body-count of deaths-by-Devil are so imitative in style and feel to the killings in THE OMEN, that this miniseries seems like a weird hybrid of both ROSEMARYS BABY and THE OMEN. One saving grace: Jason Isaacs (playing the Satan sycophant) is always a pleasurable pain to watch, ever since his evil incarnate turn in THE PATRIOT. French actress Carole Bouquet as his sincerely hypocritical wife is also a delight. But Patrick Adams doesnt fit in John Cassavetes shoes and hardly seems to be wearing any all his own, and Zoe Saldana is, well, no Mia Farrow. And not that she should be - except, in not bringing anything new and unique to the role herself, well, comparisons are inevitable. Curiously, on the back of the DVD we are told in fairly large letters without quotation marks or critical attribution that ZOE SALDANA HYPNOTIZES. But she really doesnt. And how curious that nowhere on the DVD casing are any of the others actors (with the exception of Patrick Adams) even mentioned, nor is the director or any of the production team. Well, with four Saldanas as producers - including the films star - I suspect these omissions may very well have been by commission. One good thing: given the coming Halloween season my appetite has been whetted to watch ROSEMARYS BABY again - the Polanski version, that is.

Commits the ultimate sin... it is BORING! The Roman Polanski version is a classic. I watched this hoping it would answer some lingering questions I had of the original, but found myself fast forwarding through most. Complete waste of time.

I love this movie!!!

Good movie-they did a nice job on this renake.

Great !!

This version makes good use of Zoe Saldana, Carole Bouquet and Jason Isaacs. Not especially well done or interesting otherwise.

not nearly the psycho thriller of the Polanski original - why re-do a masterpiece in the first place? See the original

With all due respect to reviewer John Bowen, one does not need to be a person who hates all remakes to find this one sadly lacking. Yes, the production values are high and the acting is good. But it is now an entirely different, and far less effective, movie. For starters, to pander to todays audiences bloodlust, a lot of graphic gore has been added, something that was completely absent in the magnificent original. For instance, when Rosemary is told that her apartment building once housed the notorious Trench Sisters, who allegedly indulged in cannibalism, instead of learning about it through a casual reference in conversation, as in the original, here we have to be subjected to a flashback sequence showing the sisters kill and graphically dismember a man, blood squirting in their faces, a hatchet hacking off his arm, etc. And where Rosemarys friend Hutch, who tries to warn her, discreetly dies off camera in a coma in the original (and teasingly leaves us wondering what exactly happened), here he (changed now to an investigative police officer) has convulsions in his car with blood running out of his nose before being squashed like a bug by a large truck that smears him all over the pavement like a giant packet of ketchup. What was gained by this? More detrimental is the fact that this remake gives away too much, way too soon. What made the original such an effective chiller was the fact that so much was left ambiguous up until the end. The viewer of that version has to piece together the various bits of evidence at the same time Rosemary does, so that we share in her gradual discovery and growing horror. In the remake, it is quickly established upfront that the Castevets are evil Satanists who have supernatural powers and can grotesquely kill people at their whim, which they do in several additional scenes of gratuitous bloodshed. As a result, the final revelation that was so shocking in the original becomes entirely anticlimactic, almost beside the point. One is forced to ask why this remake was undertaken at all. Was it just to add visible bloodshed? Why didnt they just come up with a new story in which victims are mangled in graphic detail by Satanists instead of trashing what was and remains a masterpiece? In the hands of Roman Polanski, who adhered remarkably to the details of the original novel, Rosemarys Baby was an extraordinarily effective and subtle psychological thriller that actually made you think even as it more and more scared the bejeezus out of you. Agnieszka Holland, on the other hand, who directed this tasteless trash, has managed to transform it into just another gory slasher flick. No need to think, no need for innuendo, just buckets of blood to satisfy adolescent hunger for gross-out violence. Perhaps Holland should have renamed her hatchet-job Rosemarys Abortion.

I do not know how good is the content, for my player cannot play it. But other discs from the same shipment playing well on the same player. Do not know why!