MAMA MIA, HERE WE GO AGAIN......ON ITS 50TH, BQ CHECKS THE DIAPER ON 'ROSEMARY'S BABY'........

Rosemary's Baby (1968)    50 years old already?

            You mean little Adrien, Rosemary's satanic spawn is now eligible for AARP benefits and the bargain Senior Meals at International House Of Whatever We Decide To Call It Nesxt?

             The li'l devil's all grown up........technically he's 52, since the movie assigns his birth date at 6/6/66 (heh,heh, heh, eat your heart out, Damian).......making Mia Farrow's Rosemary the official first victim of #The-Devil-Raped-Me-Too movement.......

             So how's it hold up, all these years later?

              Still near perfect........slick and classy enough to eschew the jump scares.......and so confident in its ability to creep you out, it doesn't even have to show you the titular infant.........(and cellphone-digital camera movie directors take note.....'Rosemary' achieves its iconic status in vibrant bright Technicolor....look into it....just sayin')

             Here's what struck us immediately.........unlike a thousand barely scribbled, botched adaptations of popular novels, this movie strictly adhered to...."if it ain't broke, don't fix it..."

             But that's only because Roman Polanski didn't know any better......

              Unaware that as a screenwriter-director, he could have disemboweled the book and made the story his own, instead, he slavishly followed the text, scene by scene, line by line.  To the undying delight of novelist Ira Levin, Polanski delivered an astonishingly faithful adaptation of the book........pretty much unheard of in Hollywood.

              Bring on the kudos.......Mia Farrow, all 70 pounds of her, so waif-like and wispy she looks like she could barely squeeze a tennis ball out of her womb, let along Lucifer's Big Boy....(equipped with claws and hooves no less....)

              And let's hear it for John Cassavetes, taking on the most thankless role in the film.......the struggling actor who sells his soul for Hollywood fame by sex-trafficking his wife to Beelzebub.  (If they remade the movie in the 90's, he'd more likely offered up Rosemary on a silver platter to Harvey Weinstein.....)

              Finally, that wondrous, glorious cast, delivered out of mothballs from the Hollywood Wax Museum Of Ancient Character Actors......Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Elisha Cook Jr., Ralph Bellamy, Patsy Kelly, Phil Leeds.........what an inspiration, turning this witches' coven into an Assisted Living Home From Hell...…

              (Special mention to the movie's producer, none other than the carnival-barker, Hollywood shlockmeister himself, William Castle.  Wisely, no one in their right mind would let Castle direct the movie....(fearing it would feature vibrating seats and little horned devils floating over the audience's heads)…..but credit Bill with being a good sport and showing up in the film as a cameo red herring...)

               So half a century later, it still scares up 4 well earned goosebumps (****) for a horrorshow that always delivers a devilishly good time.......revisiting Rosemary and her slit-eyed tot is always worth a trip to Hell and back......