Screw the plot, you all know the plot. They stuck to the plot, but moved it to Paris and updated it. Kind of. This is fifty years later and there are things like sonograms and advances in medical and birthing science that they could ignore. Like the feckless faithful ignore evolution. Rosemary’s Baby, the TV Movie, is at its heart a medical soap opera. I wish they had that old timey organ. It certainly moved slow enough to be a soap. You could feel the screaming of the celluloid as it was stretched beyond agony. Except the scene where Rosemary figures everything out with the Scrabble pieces. That scene was a second and a half. And then there’s Patrick J. Adams as Guy. You know how they say someone like Peter O’Toole can read a phone book and it would be interesting? Well Patrick Adams could read the best of Shakespeare and you’d slit your wrists in a phone booth like David in An American Werewolf in London, a horror comedy that had more thrills than Rosemary’s Baby. What the fuck is up with him? Guy Woodhouse with doubts? He’s a self-indulgent self-important wannabe artist who gets a kick out of whoring his wife to the devil. And then Guy gets upset that the kid’s not his? That his wife was screwing around? That he was a cuckold? Who does he think he is, Joseph the Carpenter in The Bible? Oh, the devil fucked my wife. Poor me. And Adams couldn’t even commit to that. Jason Isaacs finally gets the chance to play he who shall not be named, or is it he who should not be played? Roman Castevet, the devil himself. Though, I did like how he smoked a cigar, don’t know if the writers know anything about Santeria. Carole Bouquet played Margaux Castevet on the second night like she’d exhausted herself the night before. The atmosphere left nothing to the imagination. Nothing. No suspense. No creepy crawlies that we couldn’t make out. Not even any popups. The only time I was even remotely wary was when Rosemary raised the knife over her head to threaten the baby. And even then, I didn’t buy it. I’d write more, but why? Rosemary’s Baby already went on too long. Oh and why waste time on sex scenes when you can’t show anything? For all the work that went into this, it should have been a personal vision to at least one of the people involved, not a sanitized corporate committee version. Ave satanas, irrumabo, qui matres.
