#154: The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
Who is this for?
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 7, 2019.
Initial release: May 12, 2003
Network: ABC
Director: Craig R. Baxley
It must be nice to be Stephen King. You’re the most famous author in the world. You fear no editor. Half your books are made into movies. And you once owned the TV movie market so you could get away with crap like this.
Way back in the early 2000s there was a TV miniseries — one of several — written by Stephen King called Rose Red about a big haunted house in seattle. It was kind of a big hit in part because King hadn’t self-indulged himself into irrelevance yet, so naturally they came up with a prequel novel that some other guy wrote. This novel, bluntly titled My Life at Rose Red: the Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, basically detailed the life and times of the lady of the house around the turn of the 20th century and how the house came to be haunted (it turns out the house is alive or something.) And then they made a TV movie of that.
So score another one for the “who is this for?” file. Rose Red was decent enough as a miniseries, at least as far as I remember it, but there was absolutely no need to write a prequel, or adapt said prequel into a movie. And yet here we are. So let’s review it, shall we?
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (you can see they dropped the first part of the title) is a 90-minute run through the history of the house and its owners, from Ellen’s marriage to a wealthy industrialist fuckboy to her relationship with her attendant, a girl she met in Africa. Simple enough. But one of my long-standing complaints about television as a medium is how it necessarily demands a rigid structure for commercial breaks, denying films and shows the right to be as freeform as they should be. Even Netflix originals still do this to some extent, and it’s maddening. As a made-for-tv movie, this film is no different, forced to not only fit in the commercial break structure, but not even allowed to go beyond a two-hour timeslot (and that’s with commercial breaks, so it’s really 90 minutes.) The end result is a poorly-paced, disjointed mess with boilerplate special effects, mawkish direction and bad acting from everyone except Tsidii Le Loka and maybe the guy who played Doug Posey, the business partner of Ellen’s shitty husband.
I’m honestly shocked that this movie got made — ABC must have been desperate to get eyeballs during sweeps week that year. There’s just no reason for it to exist. It’s not just a bad melodrama, it’s not even scary. It’s just… a bad TV horror movie with some racist stereotypes. The only thing i can really give it credit for is the set design isn’t bad — the house is the real character in this movie, and it should look the part. But it honestly wasn’t worth the 4 bucks I spent to watch it on Amazon Prime, which I was shocked to find it on. Don’t waste your time.
