Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby

It was a foolish idea to make a sequel to a film which even today (mainly today) remains the best horror movie ever done.Patty Duke who was a wunderkind when she was a child (remember "the miracle worker")was given a poor part and she was sadly unsupported by the rest of the cast (if my memory serves me well,only Ruth Gordon remained from the original cast).

In order to give this dud a "biblical" feel ,the story is divided into "books" (the book of Rosemary;the book of Adrian ;the book of Andrew).The flick begins with the impressive last lines of Polanski's work (You want me to be HIs mother?/Aren't you His mother?) You do not need anything else when you've seen the 1968 film.

Ira Levin ,who had nothing to do with this made-for-TV sequel,wrote in 1999 "son of Rosemary" which was not as successful as his first novel:the conclusion ,they say,has an "hidden " meaning based on a pun.I've been trying to solve it for months ,to no avail..Anyway Levin should not have written it in the first place.

I finally found it out:nothing to get hung about.

This belated sequel to the original hit film has been widely condemned by reviewers and fans of the original since it was first released back in 1976. I think they're being a little unfair, because this is certainly acceptable viewing and it works well in places as an atmospheric and subtle little thriller. It probably would have worked better had it not been a sequel to ROSEMARY'S BABY, a film it feels nothing like despite the return of Ruth Gordon in her skin-crawling role.

The film pulls the trick of swapping Patty Duke for a missing Mia Farrow, although it's a switch that you never really buy. The emphasis now is on the baby as a young man, with most of the running time occupied by Adrian feeling conflicted over the good and evil within him and struggling to battle the forces of evil, led by an enjoyably polite and genteel Ray Milland. Adrian is played by Stephen McHattie, who I know as an actor from the likes of 300 and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (he was one of the coffee shop robbers in the latter) but didn't realise was acting as far back as the 1970s.

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY is episodic in places and the early sequences feel rather disjointed, although it all plays out better from the mid section onward. The ending is more than a little predictable. Overall, this feels more like an OMEN film than a sequel to ROSEMARY'S BABY, and there's no doubt that the success of THE OMEN saw it hastily written and released. As black magic thrillers from the 1970s go, though, it's a very middling genre instalment.

I usually seek to find good in movies, even the bad ones.Unfortunately this movie is one where I fail miserably-and the fact that there's barely one positive review on this board shows many IMDb reviewers share my pain.

I don't usually watch sequels but I just had to see this since I love "Rosemary's Baby" so much. What a mistake that was. It simply reaffirms my belief in the fact that most sequels are lousy-though thankfully, very few are as bad as this. In fact in my mind this isn't even really a sequel, it's a satire on how bad a sequel can be. Movie recommended very highly for not viewing-at any time-ever.

I'm a big fan of "Rosemary's Baby", so when I found out there was a sequel, I was ecstatic... until I actually saw it. I have heard people who read Ira Levin's sequel "Son of Rosemary" say that Levin could not have possibly come up with a worse follow-up story to his original; these people have obviously not seen this film. The fact that the movie refers to the coven as "the tribe" is all-telling. (A "tribe" of witches? Please!) The "tribe" eventually abandons Adrian as their Antichrist in favor of Adrian's son. (Why would the grandson of Satan make a better Antichrist than the son of Satan?) Even Ruth Gordon, whose brilliant performance in "Rosemary's Baby" won her an Oscar, is too old and senile in this film to be interesting. Put this on your must-skip list.

This film is a bad film but to gain any nutritional value from it I recommend watching it back to back with Rosemary's Baby.

There is a lot to learn seeing how different directors can draw different performances from the same actors playing the same characters. Observe Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) and the fine work she did in the first film vs the awful rendition in this film.

It is also interesting to see how the same characters were played by different actors. Which leads me to wonder if anyone involved with the sequel were aware of the first film and did any of them watch Rosemary's Baby before making this?

If your interest in films is purely superficial then you would best avoid this one. I have a lot more to say about this film but I really don't want to go there.