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The Ring

The love was not sent down this well

20th March 2003
Nina Dubravec

About this film

Title	The Ring
Director	Gore Verbinski
Release Date	21 February 2003
Certificate
Genres	Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Our Rating	2.0/5.0

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More by Nina Dubravec

the ring trailer

I'll be honest, I haven't seen the original recent Japanese version of The Ring. Maybe I should have seen it before the American remake, because I'm now kind of put off.

The Ring starts with two teenage girls discussing a new urban myth- a videotape which has disturbing images that are almost like someone's dream. Once you finish watching the videotape the phone rings, and a voice tells you you only have 7 days to live. As we find out, one of the girls has watched the video,seven days ago, and the film then takes us through a fairly tense sequence as we watch her get killed. Her auntie, played by Naomi Watts, begins to investigateher death and decides to find and watch the video herself. The film follows Watts, as she tries to find out who or what is behind the video and how it can be stopped.

This was meant to be an original and tense thriller and not your usual teen horror flick. It does partly achieve this by not using guts and gore, but instead relies more on the chill factor. However, the rest of the film uses so much teen horror flick techniques that it seems Verbinski (Time Machine and The Mexican) doesn't seem to realise genuine creepiness does require a certain deviation from the genre, in more than one respect. I find the most frustrating of these, the main female character, Rachel, played by Watts, who is irritating and does not possess any common sense, despite apparently being a strong and independent single mother. My personal favourite was her being hit in the head by a TV and hence flying down a well. The film is not only a remake, but has elements of about 4 other horror films within the plot, those that came to my mind, were Poltergeist, Scream, Psycho,to name a few...It also has a few 'dramatic' soap opera moments, which probably meant to shock, but made me and the people sitting next to me laugh. What wecould call the second ending was an improvement on the first, which was pure American cheesiness, but the conclusion is just a tad silly and you are left exiting the cinema saying "What??". I think more should have been made of the boy, who has the scariest eyes and just generally really reminded me of The Shining, and although not exactly great as an actor was creepier than the dead girl.

I went to this film expecting to be scared, and I'll admit it, I was. But I'm afraid I just wasn't scared enough to ignore the flaws of this remake.