Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Catharina_Sweden I think this series should never have been made. It is an insult to the Danish original. They have got _everything_ wrong! Instead of the very special, unique creepy atmosphere in "Riget", in combination with its special black humour and human interest - this series only provides cheep thrills like any horror movie. And not very good ones at that, either...Where did the talking ant-eater come from - how very stupid! And why can we hear when dogs are thinking about who is going to get them dinner... like in a movie for children! And the vampire in the basement... just inserted because vampires are in fashion now I suppose..? *sighs* This whole remake stinks. It is so incredibly stupid, immature, simplified, and watered down. It is so obvious that the producers have not understood the original at all... Or - maybe you have to be Scandinavian to understand it..? In any case, it was an idiotic idea to even try to take a Scandinavian master-piece and transform it to Hollywood...The characters that are based on original characters in "Riget" are also all wrong. They are too ordinary - not the very special individuals in "Riget", that one got to know and love and will remember until one dies, I think.Ernst Hugo Järegårds character - a Swedish doctor who has to work in Denmark because he has made a serious mistake in Sweden, and finds everything in Denmark so much worse than in Sweden - is just one example of this. He is irreplaceable! And the old conflict between Denmark and Sweden which makes his famous cry "Danskjävlar" so fun - can of course not be replaced by someone who just moves from one city to another in the same country... The funny thing with this Danish-Swedish conflict in "Riget", was that everybody in the Nordic countries recognized the stereotypes: Swedes are supposed to be more organized, while Danes are supposed to be more bohemian...The old lady is not at all the same person either: in this American remake she is much too ordinary, and too young and healthy-looking. In the original she was a very special, warm person, old and frail, with the special quality of someone who is tuned into the spirit world and soon is going to belong to it... And with much love and sympathy for the forlorn ghosts.The young people with Down's syndrome are not right either. They are also too ordinary. In the original, their awful statements about what was happening in the hospital, and their cruel predictions, at the same time as they continued to smile and be so affable and likable as only people with DS can be - was something extraordinary! You at the same time shivered and "loved" the young people every time you saw them, and you just felt and accepted that they had a peephole into the world of shadows that we ordinary "normal" people do not have... But here they are used as cute little goblins!The explanation for the haunting is also much too simple and ordinary in this American series. And - there are thousands of little spicy details in the original that are lacking here...

red_hyro Stephen King's version of the Danish Miniseries "The Kingdom", about a hospital filled with oddballs and ghosts, manages to render what had been a funny, thoughtful, and eerie story into a boring piece of dog poop. Skip it and make the effort to find the original by Lars von Trier, you'll be glad you did.In his other works, King is good at occasionally creating scary moments, some even filled with prolonged dread; yet what makes his novels readable and other television projects such as "Rose Red" watchable when wading through the banal characters, plot points and scenes, is here lacking, which is strange. It may be explained by his inability to create the subtle forms of eeriness on display in his source material, which used quiet and stillness, not as the preface to a suddenly scream, but a soft murmur. King doesn't have the patience, and instead fills up the spooky quiet with incessant yammering.Gone as well are the often comic and/or obsessive, yet believably human characters which were the backbone of the original series by Lars Von Trier. King instead treats us to boring clichés reminiscent of one dimensional characters from his other works.The charmingly arrogant, scheming and blustering doctor Stig Helmer, one of the original series' many treasures, is robbed of his intelligence and turned into Dr. Stegman, a craven moron whose own arrogance, bluster and scheming ways would have seemed too broad on M.A.S.H. King can't stand to create mere A-holes, they must be inhumanly evil and stupid. Yosemite Sam was more nuanced and received less cloyingly saccharine comeuppance from his adversaries, although Yosemite's comeuppance was distinguished by being funny: no such luck with Stegman, and the Kingdom Hospital is plagued by King's inability to write intentionally funny lines. (Unfortunately the hilariously awful similes which turn up in his prose works have not appeared to have made it into his scripts, but there are laughs to be found here in the dialogue.) We are also treated to elements familiar to readers of King: tedious interior monologues; annoying singing by various characters; inhuman, snarling bad guys; a wise-cracking, delightlessly sassy god-character (here, a giant anteater); and writing which leaves nothing to be spelled out by the audience. This last quality is perhaps the most annoying of King's as writer, his inability to allow for ambiguities, to let something remain less than obvious.

eshoeme I didn't watch Ridget by Lars Von Trier. I just saw this series collection box at a store, was FOOLED by it's cover and bought it. Hey, I'm not the first who falls into that tale. So I am here to alert you. What is this Kingdom Hospital about anyway? Do we have ghosts of little girls, do we have blood gushing out someone's eyes? No. This series is supposed to be something like "bizarre dark comedy". But you do not laugh. You do not cry. You won't be scared or confused. You will be looking at your TV screen cursing the advertising studio that made that ludicrous DVD cover. And asking yourself "hey, what happened to Stephen King? Did he eat some rotten tacos before doing that?" Yes, he probably did.The thing is, if you're going to make something about a hospital with bizarre sense of humor, you should create an atmosphere in there. I felt like I was watching ER second season after ingesting some cough medicine bottles. And it wasn't fun as it sounds.SPOILERI never thought that someone would think that a anteater could be threatening. Those quiet animals NOT even have teeth. They eat ants for crissake! A angry koala would more scary than a "anteater from the underworld". WATCH OUT! IS THE LONG TONGUE OF DOOM! Blah.

jumbopasatebos A script that's a total mess, story lines that go absolutely nowhere and generic characters did not help this American version of "Riget" to stand on it's feet.At first I have to say I was attracted by this series because it seemed like offering something new and more complicated than your average "Jack Bauer-hour". I understood the fact that this adaptation needed time and space to find a steady pace, so it was OK for me to wait for 5-6 episodes to see the sparkles flickering on my TV screen...Alas, it was all to no avail. The main story had no direction and although the hospital was clearly the central setting it did not give any sign of coherence to the series. The characters were rough caricatures of people and, sometimes, even their dialogue lines made no sense. It was like listening to stereotypical mambo-jumbo and, it may sound "arty" for a while but on the long run it brings nothing more than a head-ache. The level of acting was also average, even for a TV show. No explanation was given on anything and having a week's gap between each episode made the whole thing difficult to watch so I gave up after half season. I suspect that in DVD format, it's maybe easier to follow but I really don't have the guts to go through this series again...This show was really really bad. But as I said earlier the worst part of this deal is not the quality itself rather than the abandoned promises... Looks like they promised us the stars but left us dangling in the gutter, instead.