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.

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.

Sam O'Steen, the film editor on the superlative suspense flick "Rosemary's Baby" from 1968, here directs a quickie TV-made sequel, one in which Rosemary Woodhouse (Patty Duke Astin, in for Mia Farrow) is shunted off early--and inexplicably--presumably to help flesh out the more ghoulish aspects of this flaccid story about Satan's son on Earth. Most interesting is the return of Ruth Gordon to her Oscar-winning role as Minnie Castevet (with Ray Milland well-cast as her husband, Roman), but she isn't given much to do--and looks terribly uncomfortable at being involved anyway. This script is strictly low-rent goods, and must have shamed original author Ira Levin (who went on to write his own sequel). Fairly dim and pallid, with poor photography and no suspense or scares whatsoever.

With its few touches of surrealism, LWHTRB works as low-grade horror, but as a major follow-up statement to the original, it flounders miserably.

Things begin somewhat promising during the telefilm's opening credits... We see and hear several interesting shots and sounds: The Baby's black crib with the overhanging, inverted cross; the kitchen knife Rosemary carried into the Castevette's apartment and dropped in shock (the utensil is shown sticking out of the hardwood floor); and the emptiness of the Bramford itself, without tenants or furniture (voice-overs can be heard here from the previous film's dialog). Interesting too is the Easter Egg hunt the titular child participates in (the eggs and baskets are also black). Once the story gets rolling, it never really 'rolls'... And what happens to Rosemary when she boards that driverless bus, and is whisked away to God-knows-where?

Patty Duke (a poor replacement for Mia Farrow), Ray Milland and Tina Louise (as the Southwestern Whore who raises the child, "Adrian/Andrew") head this almost-star cast, with Ruth Gordon reprising her "Minnie" role.

Although not a total failure, this sequel-of-sorts should have been released in book form first, then maybe we all could have been a bit better informed... and not left totally in the dark. A fairly recent sequel novel "Son of Rosemary" (1999?) is the legitimate followup by Ira Levin himself.

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.