We said this before, when the remake of Rosemary’s Baby with Zoe Saldana plopped onto NBC. NOw it’s back on DVD…and this is why you shouldn’t bother with it: it’s not only boring, it’s creepy in all the wrong ways.

Basically, we’re looking at the really uncomfortable story of a black woman who is roofied and date-raped by a blue-eyed devil (literally), who is helped by her (white) husband, bullied by (white) friend and (white) foe alike, and ultimately becomes the lifelong slave to her white-devil baby. Yeah, kind’a icky. Just a few points:

• Having her drugged and semiconscious during her impregnation and amnesiac after says something entirely different in 2014 than it did in 1968. It turns it from dark seduction by a never-seen Satan into, well rape. See above.
• And we have to ask: why was this story, so quintessentially about New York eccentrics, moved to Paris? And why is Zoe Saldana completely surrounded by white Europeans, without a person of color in sight?
• Some of the decisions we not just painfully ‘meta,’ they were painfully bad. Like taking a woman who’s pregnant, catastrophically lost weight and looks like hell…and give her Mia Farrow’s haircut from 1968! (or in this case, a bad wig). THAT’s the ticket!
• Did you know that Ira Levin’s original novel, Rosemary’s Baby was out of print for years until NBC revived this? Yeah, THAT’S how much people were clamoring for a remake.
• The difficulty is “Rosemary” never does anything for herself. She does what her husband, her friends (real and Satanist), her doctors tell her. She runs to friends or cops are anyone other than herself for rescue. What, she can’t buy her own ticket out of town? Can’t go to a hotel by herself? As if she hasn’t the brains, the courage, or the presence of mind to take care of herself in the year 2014. How is this realistic, understandable, or sympathetic?
• With all the hallucinations and match-cuts, it’s hard to tell if Rosemary is victim of multiple partners, multiple rapes, or dementia. In any event, it’s creepy, and not in a good way.
• Some of the ‘plot twists,’ and we use the term very loosely, are just damn silly. Like Roman, the ‘brilliant’ serial killers, who deices that the best way to hide in plain sight is to make your new name an anagram of your original, notorious, homicidal name. ‘Cause NO one’s ever gonna notice that! 
• Rosemary does show some pluck in Part 2, fighting the Satanist Conspiracy, but she’s so hysterical and disjointed that even we don’t believe her.
• Note this revelation: Bad driving and jaywalking in Paris is the fault of SATANIST MAGIC. Little did we know! And what does that say about Boston, ehhh?
• Medical Alert #1: Let’s get clear: just because a healthy young woman has a miscarriage does not make her second pregnancy “at risk.” Almost 20% of all women’s first pregnancies end in miscarriage. That’s 1 in 5. Unless, of course, you’re birthing the Anti-Christ.
• What a puzzlement. Zoe Saldana and her sisters produce a movie about an intelligent and beautiful woman who’s supposed to be sympathetic, but is in fact bullied by her husband, by her strange neighbors, by her doctors.
• Medical Alert #2: MRI’s are non-invasive, magnetic and not radioactive in origin, and pose no known threat to a fetus. They’re also not used in fetal imaging technology, so why it would be requested to begin with (by a non-Satanic OB, yet) is questionable.
• Maybe it’s just us, but the physical representation of Satan looks more like a Saturday Matinee Dracula than the eternal, immortal, all-powerful Prince of Lies.
• “’The Sins of the father shall not be visited on the son,’ Roman says. ‘Your Bible says so.” Actually the Bible says that…and the exact opposite. Twice. Exodus says no; Deuteronomy says yes. Ezekiel says no; Numbers says yes. YOU be the judge!
• Here’s the final big question: if the intent was to put her into a coma, fake a stillbirth, and take the baby from her…why not just imprison her from the beginning and then kill her, since they do that with such ease and impunity with everyone else? If the intent was to convert her into the Antichrist’s Mother Mary, why not begin that with the (imprisoned) Rosemary while she’s pregnant? And does any of this really matter of her baby’s going to steal her brain anyway?

Bottom of it all: Not very scary, not very engaging, a poor showcase for a wonderful actress (even though she and her sisters, inexplicably, exec-produced it). The real horror here is that Rosemary’s Baby is about a black woman being forced to have a white…thing’s…baby, and then having her child stolen from her or willingly allow herself to become a slave to her rapists for the rest of her life. Ew. And if  anybody thought moving it to Paris and populating the film with Europeans would keep anybody noticing that…no. It didn’t. It just made you want to take a shower after the final credits.