Where is my Ellen Rimbauer Action Figure? By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan (October 2017) The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer (2003) Directed by Craig R. Baxley

The book on which our TV-movie was based was not written by Stephen King (though many readers assume so) but by Ridley Pearson under a pseudonym. It was part of a tie-in promotional campaign for Stephen King’s mini- series Rose Red, which we’ve discussed previously here at “King of the Movies.” It’s a truly fun idea and you’ve got to admire the creativity behind it. The series Rose Red was about a crazily haunted house under investigation by a prominent paranormal researcher. The researcher discovers that the house’s former lady, Ellen Rimbauer, had a mysterious and unhealthy link to the property. That lady’s diary apparently gives us great insight into how everything went wrong. Imagine, for example, the diary of a person who “walked alone” in the heyday of Shirley Jackson’s classic creation, Hill House. Pretty great, right? So I give them credit for a great marketing idea. You should also know that I’ve not read the book myself; I’m bending the rules of my page, but since Stephen King didn’t write it, I reckon all bets are off. In spite of such a fun marketing idea, it’s a shame that Rose Red was such a silly, overblown miniseries with precious few scares and a boatload of characters I mostly wanted to punch in the neck. It hardly seems to deserve a promotional campaign. Still, the book The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer was fairly well-received, garnering a few good professional reviews and sort of a mixed- bag of feelings from reviewers online. From what I gather, if you like gothic thrillers with mildly depraved sexuality thrown in, it’s not half bad. But we’re here to talk about the movie adaptation itself, which is worse yet than Rose Red, frequently comically awful and also badly flawed.

At 90 minutes, you’d hope there wouldn’t be much suffering to do, but The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer is so dull it stretches on to infinity somehow, as if the film itself is a haunted thing with the power to distort perceptions.

The acting is awful, everybody striking the same note over and over. The story takes place over several years but no one ever changes a bit: Ellen is dismayed, Connie is supportive, Fanny is a vamp, Sukeena is wise, John is wicked, and Madame Lu is psychic. From what I understand, both John and Ellen are slowly “going mad” from a disease they picked up in Africa, but, you know, I had to learn that from the book reviews and saw no evidence of it in the film. Lisa Brenner plays Ellen as “dismayed,” and Stephen Brand plays John as “wicked” in nearly every circumstance without change. Ponderous dialog is intent on telling us what is obvious only, never offering any interesting insights or wit. Ellen: I have a terrible feeling about this. Sukeena: The house is protecting you. Ellen: No, that cannot be true. Such things do not happen. Sukeena: You know it is the truth. Ellen: John will not hear of such nonsense. Sukeena: Your husband will soon know the truth as well. Ellen: But what is the truth? Sukeena: You know what the truth is. It is happening now. Ellen: I have a terrible feeling about this. Sukeena: The house is protecting you. Ellen: No, that cannot be true. Such things do not happen, etc. etc. The script has clearly left out important, if not vital, details, so that things happen which seem mysteriously relevant to the story but for which we have no context. If reading the book was required beforehand, I wish someone had told me. Moreover, and more annoying, is that the movie was poorly constructed (including continuity errors or editing so bad that there at least appear to be continuity errors). Before the credits roll, the movie intros with a dull séance lead by Madame Lu, smack in the middle of the mansion Rose Red. (There is a kind of ignorant racism in the story, imbuing both the only black character and the only Asian character with “supernatural” abilities and skills.) During the séance it is revealed that Rose Red wants unspeakable evil to . . . oh wait a minute, no, the house just wants some extra rooms added on. Dismayed Ellen Rimbauer is present for the séance with her wicked husband EVEN HIS SIDEBURNS ARE WICKED. John and her supportive friend Connie. Blah blah, séance ends, dismayed Ellen goes to her room, tells wicked John to leave her alone; all wicked John ever wants is sex anyway. After she gazes at the picture of herself, her husband and her TWO children, dismayed Ellen begins writing very slowly in her diary about how she came to be in this terrible predicament. Hark ye to this introductory scene, which will be replayed in its theoretically chronological place later in the movie, and I mean replayed from beginning to end, as if we hadn’t just seen it 45 minutes before. Here’s what’s even more fun: the séance scene has a somewhat different outcome when it is reshown, a trick that annoys me. Plus, that picture Ellen was looking at? That second child wasn’t born until after the séance. This is what I mean about continuity issues. Anyway, Ellen writes in her diary, “It’s hard to believe that only seven years ago . . .” and this is an obvious cue for us to go back in time. We flashback to seven years earlier. Just after the turn of the 20th Century, we meet young Ellen. We know nothing about her and never will. No background, nothing. Just “here she is, it’s Ellen; she’s pretty, apparently, and soon to be dismayed.” Ellen is certain that oil tycoon John Rimbauer is going to propose to her soon. We’ll never know how these two met or what has happened between them up until now. Ellen loves him, anyway, completely unaware that he’s wicked. He takes her to the countryside and shows her the mansion he is having reconstructed for her. “Brought from England, brick by brick,” he says. Would you like to know why he did that, or what the history of the house was in England, or anything? Read the book. Maybe the answer is there. What we do know is that during the re- construction, several men are killed on the site. BOOM, you got yourself a haunting. Sorry about spoilers (not really – that is, not really sorry, and not really spoilers) but Rose Red (the name Ellen has given the house) jealously loves its new mistress and will, over the next few years, scare and/or abduct people who threaten Ellen. Well, sure, it’ll let Ellen’s emotionally abusive husband carry on for a decade, but if that slut Fanny shows her face, I promise you won’t be seeing that floozy again. This means that for the next decade of Ellen’s life, we’ll watch her being dismayed and wondering why people (including her own daughter) keep going missing in Rose Red. Her servant/friend Sukeena keeps telling her why, but Ellen is not only dismayed but pretty slow in the head. Ellen’s lousy marriage is also expounded on endlessly even though we get it. John is a sex maniac. Even on their honeymoon, he gets Ellen drunk and coerces her into a three-way with a native African girl. The movie tries to touch on Ellen’s own buried passions, hinting that she secretly loves the kinky stuff, but we’re never given enough insight into her character, or John’s, to know what effect this has on anything. She might love the kinky stuff but she’s pretty bitchy about MADAME LU HEAR ANCIENT CHINESE SECRET. everything during the daylight hours. And John – well, who knows what the hell is going on with this character. He’s a Lifetime Original Television villain, a bad husband who thinks his wife is there for his pleasure and nothing else. Well, we’ve got a decade to cover and only 90 minutes to do it, so Diary will start setting down like a time machine every year or so to show us that not a goddamn thing has changed. There is an effort to make us think some terrible menacing evil is building up; the effort is not successful. If the subsequent summary feels lopsided and incomplete, that is because of the source material.

Slowly (oh, so slowly) the movie grinds through its time as one serving girl after another vanishes into Rose Red, followed by a loyal employee that John figuratively shanked, then Ellen’s disfigured daughter April (ol’ FreakyArm, I like to call her – not because she has one shriveled arm, but because she clearly has a perfectly healthy arm poorly hidden under her dress). My favorite serving girl is Gail, the redheaded Irish maid whose dialog coach was either slacking or playing a great prank on someone. She’s got the worst Irish accent I’ve ever heard in a professional production.

By my calculations, Sukeena and Ellen investigate Rose Red maybe once every three years or so, never mind that they live there 24/7, and in these investigations, they find mysterious things. They find shackles in the garage, and Ellen, after a “terrifying” vision of a ghost in the shackles, believes John is playing kinky sex games out there with maids. Such philandering causes Rose Red to abduct the maids to protect Ellen. Later John is all Mr. Blamey as he demands to know what Ellen was doing in the garage anyway, like that’s some kind of forbidden country for women. Rather than admitting she was in the garage, seeing both shackles and an actual friggin ghost, Ellen just looks dismayed and then the movie skips away to something else.

Another time, Sukeena and Ellen find a peephole into John’s study. “This is how he spies on his rivals,” says Ellen, which makes me wonder what the hell John’s business rivals are doing lingering in his study. The only time we see John looking through a peephole is when he’s spying on an undressing maid (is she undressing in his study? I’m not real clear on this). That girl disappears too. Diary’s narrative treats John like a murderer when the truth is, he’s a philandering, bullying, 50-shades kind of molester, but he hasn’t actually killed anybody. He doesn’t even know how to play the ice-game correctly. It’s Rose Red, the house, that’s snatching up maids and/or family friends. Ultimately, the disappearance of innocent people is never enough to make Ellen or anyone else leave the place or even express more than a passing concern.

Eventually, after we have suffered the same four repeating conversations for 80 of the 90 minute run-time, there is a “climax” and a “retribution” and the movie ends with an abruptness that feels like they forgot to add a couple things until it was too late. Just about anything that happens in this “horror movie” is fairly devoid of horror, and frequently devoid of common sense. My Movie Buddy and I, lovers of bad movies, found this to be both an excruciating and hilarious experience. It’s available for renting from Netflix and is a challenge for bad-film aficionados. As is the case with all bad movies, they are far better if experienced with friends.