Return to Rose Red

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The haunted history of Stephen King's 2002 miniseries Rose Red was expanded on in the 2003 TV movie The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. The usual, delightful moral chaos of a Stephen King story is replaced by something closer to a typical romance novel. But it's still a lot of fun.

The movie's based on a book by Ridley Pearson, for some reason writing under the pseudonym of Joyce Reardon, PhD. It follows Ellen (Lisa Brenner) on her Edwardian adventures in an unspecified West African country where she has a menage a trois with her husband, John, (Steven Brand) and an unnamed African woman.

Ellen and John return home to Seattle and Rose Red manor along with Ellen's new best friend from Africa, Sukeena (Tsidii Le Loka), who, it is understood, will of course be a household servant. Eventually, both of them will have to have increasingly kinky sex with John in order to keep up their secret investigation of the house's haunting. This movie really needed to be rated R. As it is, there are lots of shots of topless womens' backs.

People disappear but it's only because the house wants to please Ellen who, like many a romance novel heroine before or after her, sits at the centre of everyone's universe for no particular reason.

I loved watching her and Sukeena investigating secret passageways.