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Red Rose

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It's Not Just Your Battery That Could Die | Red Rose review [En/Es]@adalathu1137d
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  1. Red Rose (series): had some promise, but spirals into confusing nothingness by ep 4@netflixr1139d

    There's only 8 episodes and they are an hour long. This is quite standard for any series these days it appears and this one started strong with the first episode really drawing me in. Unfortunately this is where the fun kind of ends and the show ends up going in a ton of different and very confusing directions as the horror drama attempts to become an 8-hour episode of Black Mirror and does so unsuccessfully.

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    When I saw the slogan "It's not just your battery that could die!" I was pretty excited. This level of cheesy advertisement is normally exactly the sort of thing I am looking for as a time waster. The show isn't a time waster semi-comedic take on the horror genre as I had hoped kind of like I Know what you did Last Summer is though, it is a dead serious drama and if you aren't paying absolute attention to what is going on, you are going to find yourself lost very quickly beyond the first episode.

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    It starts out with a bunch of angst-ridden teenagers whose entire thing is "my life is terrible even though I live a very privileged existence!" as they go to completely impossible parties in the middle of a field that is illegal because of their age and trespassing yet somehow manages to have furniture and a sound system in it. During this terribly depressing part of their lives one of the girls gets an invitation to install an app called "Red Rose."

    The app is a frightening one that any normal person would immediately delete out of fear or privacy issues seeing as how it knows where you are, knows who you are, and knows intimate details about your personal life. But not these teens - that would be far too practical. They feel compelled to follow the app's instructions, often at their own demise, for as long as I continued to watch it.

    I kept at it even though the show started to really fall apart after episode 2 and continued to watch until the end of episode 4 that I finished late last night. At that point in my viewing I honestly had very little idea what the hell was going on and they had reached a point where instead of just deleting the app and no longer doing what it asks them to do, they had instead found a computer-nerd friend that hacked the app and followed the code. This all takes place in a completely impractical and impossible literally underground hacker lab filled with the outcasts who spend all their free time fiddling with computers or something.

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    The situations that they find themselves in become increasingly deadly and paranormal but at no point in time does someone just suggest getting rid of the app or perhaps alerting the police. Nah, these teens are going to sort this out on their own even though several of their friends have died because of it.

    I'm all about horror, even stupid horror. One thing I really don't tolerate in horror is when people continually do what is counter-intuitive and what a normal person would do if they were in the same situation. I don't think that anyone in their brain trust of teens ever suggests that they just stop messing with the app. There also doesn't seem to be any beneficial incentive for them to continue doing so either.

    What started out as something that appeared as though it could be an interesting take as far as horror series (which are rare) is concerned, spirals into a confusing and logic-defying mess. I found it difficult to watch about halfway into the 3rd episode and only trudged on through episode 4 in the hopes that it would make a turn and somehow start to make sense.

    There are series out there that wait until the last hour of a series or so in order to put the pieces together but this is just too ridiculous for me to wait that long to find out. The characters could have literally stopped playing at any time that they wanted but nobody ever does that. Sorry, but I don't buy it.

    One professional reviewer stated that "The show seems as if it's uncertain of what it wants to be, and in its attempt to cover all bases of the thriller genre, the story becomes fuzzy"

    I completely agree with this. This show doesn't really have a definitive point. Is it a crime drama? Is it a social status teenage coming of age show? Is it a horror show? Is it a thriller? After watching half of it I have no idea what the answer to that would possibly be. In their attempt to be everything everywhere, all at once, they have managed to be nothing at all.

    I don't know what they could have done differently to make this show good but I really don't think there is much of an audience out there for this. The acting is done well by all involved except one or two people, but it doesn't matter since the story is so convoluted that no level of premiere acting could have improved this story IMO.

    They do a good job of roping you in with episode one though - that was very well done and truly captivating. Unfortunately everything just kind of falls apart from that point forward and I have no intention of finishing it. If you want to test my theory go ahead and watch episode one and two and see if you agree afterwards. For the most part I would recommend against even trying that and simply skip this one.

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