Rating; D
Dir: Sam O’Steen
Star: Stephen McHattie, Tina Louise, Patty Duke, Ray Milland
Eight years after Roman Polanski’s classic of Satanic panic, somebody at ABC had the misbegotten idea of a made for television sequel. Not that the original story really needed any additional material. If you’re in any doubt, sitting through this should convince you that leaving things up to the imagination can (though not always) be a good idea. You won’t be surprised to learn that neither Roman Polanski, Mia Farrow, or just about anyone involved previously, were part of this. O’Steen was the film’s editor, and Ruth Gordon returns as Minnie Castevet. That’s it. Though it’s not a bad cast generally. Certainly, better than the dreadful material deserves.
It begins with a lengthy prologue, in which Rosemary (Duke, who was a contender for the original role) escapes from the coven, with now eight-year-old Adrian. She ends up a passenger on a Satanic bus (!), while he ends up in the care of coven member Marjean (Louise). We then jump forward twenty years, where Adrian (McHattie) is a bit of a tearaway, but unaware of his origins. He is, however, about to come into his full Satanic powers, courtesy of Roman Castevet (Milland) – except, he’s just not evil enough for their purposes. The attempted disco-themed (!) ritual results in the death of Adrian’s best friend, and breaks his mind, sending him into a catatonic state. He regains consciousness in a California mental facility for the criminally insane, as the prime suspect in his friend’s death, before escaping with a nurse.
But is there any escape, really? To answer that question, would require the viewer to care about anything that’s going on here. This is a problem, because there is precious little reason to do so. It might have stood a chance at the start, if the movie had kept things simple, with Rosemary being on the run, and trying to keep Adrian out of the coven’s clutches. But the entire opening thread serves no purpose: if you tuned in twenty minutes late, you would have missed nothing of importance. And what then follows, doesn’t shed light, for example, on the coven’s motives or goals. You reach the end, and nothing much has changed. At least the further sequel hinted at (Rosemary’s Baby: The Next Generation?) never materialized.
It feels like this was more inspired by The Omen, which came out just a few months earlier. For it mutates the paranoid preggo of the original, into a story of the devil’s son coming of age. The main difference between Damien and Adrian is, the latter is not commited to the Satanic cause. It could have been an interesting source of conflict, except the film does nothing with this. McHattie, who looks like a young version of Richard E. Grant, has some indication of charisma, and it’s amusing to see him so young (a full decade before anything else of his I’d seen previously). However, this is the poor imitation of cinema, for which the seventies TV movie was infamous.