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Want to see a truly great horror film about a videotape which brings death to its viewers exactly seven days after they watch it, and about the desperate attempts of a young mother to unravel the tape's mysteries before she, her son and her ex-husband all succumb to its curse? Then see Hideo Nakata's Japanese ghost flick 'Ring', and fall under its chilling spell. Alternatively, you could see Gore Verbinski's 'The Ring', a Hollywood remake (if not quite a reimagining) of Nakata's film. The lengthened title says it all: what you have here is essentially the same film, but with the addition of some (mostly unnecessary) detail. In the original, there are hints that the young boy and his father have psychic abilities; in the remake, the father's only ability is to look good while being gormless, whereas the son's prophetic powers have become far more prominent. This proves to be something of an irrelevant distraction: a creepy bug-eyed kid receiving messages from the dead certainly has its place, but that place is 'The Sixth Sense', and it is about time that Hollywood horror dared to jump out from under that film's shadow. Director Gore Verbinski has a first name perfectly suited to horror, and his direction is suitably slick and visceral. Expect all sorts of subliminal flashes, hallucinatory distortions and moody settings; and the videotape itself is a stream of gritty, flickering images looking like something from an early Bunuel film, and every bit as unnerving. Verbinski is best known for creating the Budweiser frogs, but 'The Ring' shows that he also knows a thing or two about how to wrangle flies. Naomi Watts, who has played a woman trapped in a nightmare once before ('Mulholland Drive'), is fine here in the lead role, and her character has been made somewhat more resourceful than in the original. The young, long-haired girl at the centre of the curse was the most terrifying element of the original film, but here, played by Daveigh Chase, she looks more like the girl nextdoor, and it is only the soundtrack and fast editing which make her scenes seem even remotely scary. Brian Cox, as the girl's father, puts in his usual excellent performance, but his part (another addition to the original) is terribly written. In fact all of the film's problems stem from its rewritten script (by Ehren Kruger), which proves to be an inferior copy of Hiroshi Takahashi's original. Everything that made the Japanese 'Ring' find its way into the darkest well of our fears - its subtle suggestiveness, eerie obliquity and open-endedness - has here been explained away, laid bare, and tied together so completely that we are left with little to do but just sit there and admire the view. In making everything so much more explicit than its Japanese twin, 'The Ring' leaves less to the imagination - and that is where ghosts really reside. Not bad, but why see a film about a killer video tape when you can see the original on video? Anton Bitel, 23.02.03 |
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