Speaking of seeds of deception ... : "Rosemary's Baby"

Very weird to see this after that Lifetime movie. Heck, compared with what happens to Rosemary Woodhouse, being inseminated with a fertility doctor's sperm might not be that bad ...

(Yeah, easy for a man to say.)

Even if you haven't seen "Rosemary's Baby" -- and I hadn't -- you know the story. A young New York woman feels something just isn't right about her baby or her neighbors, despite her husband's apathy. Turns out she was right, and let's just say there were no Glendas among these witches.

Two things stand out here: the cast and the slow building of suspense. With the former, our heroine is Mia Farrow, who early in the movie seems to be saying, "Why won't anyone call that Paltrow girl on stealing my look 30 years later?" Seriously, it's uncanny when Farrow's hair is below her ears. She gets it cut later, and between that and some rough times during pregnancy looks pretty damn skeletal.

Her husband is John Cassavetes, better known as a hip director but OK here. More notable are the couple's kooky neighbors, played by Sidney Blackmer -- never heard of him; looks like a TV guy -- and Ruth Gordon. Of course, Gordon would go on to "Harold and Maude," as well as "Where's Poppa?" -- which I've heard my dad tout and no one else -- and "Every Which Way but Loose." You know her, you love her. It's a little hard to see her as satanic, but hey, I'm willing to roll with it.

There are others here -- Ralph Bellamy as an old doctor and Charles Grodin as a young one -- but let's tackle the tone of this movie. It's clear early on that something bad will happen, so watching "Rosemary's Baby" is more an exercise in how director Roman Polanski handles the leading lady's growing paranoia. In general, not bad. The movie is slow to start -- those New Yorkers, with all their talky-talky -- but that works as the tension around Rosemary grows. Soon she realizes maybe those vitamin shakes from Ruth aren't so good, and that she might want to get another doctor who doesn't smell like fungus.

I might have ratcheted up the action a bit more to keep things moving, and we probably could have trimmed a little bit of length. I also wanted a bit more from the finale -- Cassavetes' role didn't quite fit -- but can see how keeping things understated, save a chant or two, kept with the overall atmosphere of the movie. When it comes to '60s and '70s horror movies, I'll still take "The Exorcist" or "The Omen" -- "It's all for you, Damien!" -- over "Rosemary's Baby." But I'll also have to rethink what the crazy old lady who lived next to me in New York -- her name was Frieda, by the way -- was doing on the other side of that wall.