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 Teenagers who watch a "mysterious videotape" turn up dead. Their corpses are
found to be "gruesomely contorted, their eyes frozen as if they had seen
something more terrifying than any physical threat." Reiko is a journalist
who is drawn into this terror. They say that this is the most unsettling
film since The Exorcist and that it "delivers a tense spine chilling
atmosphere, filled with an overwhelming sense of dread and a potent presence of
unworldly evil." 1998, 91 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Based on a bunch of novels (none of which have been
translated into English) by somebody that has been described as the "Stephen
King of Japan" (could be like being called the "Michael Jordan of Belize"), The Ring tells the tale of a weird video tape, esp, and dead teenagers. I should add,
that The Ring does all this quite well, in spite of what may be called a muddled story.
The tale begins as kind of an urban legend being told by one teen to another.
Tomoko is telling her friend that she and some others were out somewhere
staying over night when they found this strange video tape. If you watch it,
the phone will ring shortly thereafter and you will have only a week to live.
After telling her friend this, she says that she was just kidding and then the
phone rings. Man, I gots to tell ya, when it's 2:00 a.m. and you're watching
this by yourself with the lights out and that phone pierces the relative
silence of the scene, that's what my boys on the police force call "an incident
with a high pucker factor." They answer the phone, but it's only one of the
girl's mothers. Then Tomoko's friend goes upstairs and she is left all alone.
She looks over her shoulder and then , her face freezes in this arty black and
white "negative" effect and we flash over to Reiko. Reiko is your basic nosy
reporter. She's also a single mother of a kid named Yoichi who is in the first
grade. It wouldn't surprise me if the Tokyo branch of Department of Family
Services takes her kid away from her. She leaves this little kid all by
himself at home while she's out trying to get herself cursed by this dang
haunted video tape. I also thinks that it's pretty darn abusive to make a boy
that age wear these shorts with knee-high socks like he was a fancy-lad or
something, too. I suppose that's just a difference in culture. We like our
kids to be cool, the Japanese don't.  Reiko sees this video tape deal as a welcome respite from reporting on Harry
Potter and airport security, so she starts interviewing kids at the local high
school and they begin to give us the low down on what this video tape is all
about. There's a video tape with a strange woman on it and when you watch it,
the phone rings and you croak in a week. Reiko attempts to find out if there
are really any confirmed deaths from this or if this is simply an urban legend
( I swear to God that my neighbor's cousin out in Fresno died in 1979 when he
mixed Dr. Pepper and Pop Rocks. They exploded in his mouth and that's why they
don't sell Pop Rocks anymore!). Eventually she's able to track down some news
footage of a couple of bodies being taken out of a vehicle where the teenagers
died. Slowing it down, you can see the dead girl's face is frozen in an
expression we can only describe as either "Holy crap!" or "Ah, hell no, Gina!"
Reiko actually goes home to see her kid at one point. She's going to spend
some time with him by taking him to the funeral of Tomoko. They knew her and
Reiko gets some good gossip while she was there (closed casket, nobody knows
why she died, autopsy showed Pop Rocks, etc.) Yoichi goes up to Tomoko's room
and eventually Tomoko's mom shows up and shows us the closet where she found
Tomoko's body. We see in flashback that she was curled in the fetal position,
that same expression of abject terror plastered on her face like the others.
Now, being the Scooby-Doo detective she is, Reiko notices a piece of paper on
the dresser and picks it up. It's a receipt for some pictures that Tomoko
took. Reiko goes and picks up the photos and starts looking through them. The
pictures are of Tomoko and the other dead teenagers out at some type of cabin
in a wooded area. The only thing is that those dang slackers at the Wal-Mart
photo lab have messed up the faces of all the kids in the pictures. Their
faces are all twisted and blurred, distorted a bit like their faces would
shortly really be. It is a genuinely creepy moment, though I could have sworn
I've seen that gimmick before (maybe inThe Omen?). No matter, because it ratchets up the suspense and mounting terror. You
don't know what's happening, you just know it's real bad whatever it is, and
you're urging Reiko on so she can unravel more of the mystery.  Reiko drops her kid off at the mall for a couple of days or something and heads
off to where this cabin is located. She finds it and checks in there. While
checking in, she notices behind the desk a bunch of video tapes. One of them,
in a blank white box piques her curiosity and she has the clerk give it to
her. He doesn't know where it came from or who left it there. Hmm, I wonder
what's going to be on this video tape? Reiko goes into the cabin and fires up
the TV. Since Wheel of Fortune isn't on, she decides to put the video tape in and watch that. What follows
is something that probably wouldn't be a top renter, but is compelling in its
bizarreness. As it unfolds, you find yourself paying rapt attention, hoping
you can discern some bit of what this mystery is all about. The video shows a
woman brushing her hair in a mirror, some people crawling around, a bunch of
Japanese letters which apparently spell the word "eruption," a guy in a hood
pointing, and a closeup of an eye with someone saying "Sada." Now that we know
all that, I expect that like me, you just sat there nodding your head, saying
"of course! It was so obvious!" These people all committed suicide after
watching this atrocious performance art video! Well, Reiko sits there for a
second after it's done, and then the phone rings! She answers it and realizes
that her ticket is punched for exactly one week from then. The rest of the
movie is a race against time as she tries to figure out what is happening and
if there is anyway to stop her impending death. She goes home and looks up her
ex-husband, Ryuji who is some type of college professor. He is understandably
skeptical that his ex-wife is going to be dead in a week, but also
understandably hopeful, since his alimony payments will likely end in a week.
She has him take her picture with one of those Instamatics those two probably
used for their amateur porn back when they were married. In one of those
moments filled with anticipatory dread, where you just know what's going to
happen, but hope that it doesn't, we get a gander a her picture. It's
perfectly normal. Well, except for her face being all twisted out of shape
just like all those dead teeny-boppers! Ryuji is like, "whoa," let's check
this video tape out. He watches it and the phone doesn't ring (maybe he
watched it, then took the picture - I was hiding under my couch so I couldn't
see much). Later though, he is sitting on a park bench and a woman dressed in
white and quite dirty, comes up to him and says something like "it was you, you
started this." He never looks up at her, and we only see her from the knees
down, adding to that whole unknown terror vibe that permeates the entire movie.
Now that Ryuji figures he's only got a week left, he decides that it's time to
hit the books and do a little research. Somehow or other they arrive at the
conclusion that the word "eruption" has to do with a volcanic eruption that
happened like fifty years ago and not with an obnoxious Van Halen song.
Through further investigation, they discover that this eruption was predicted
by a woman named Shizuko and that she had all sorts of odd psychic powers.
They head off to find this village where this woman was from and where this
volcano
is. Along the way they dump Yoichi off at Grandpa's house (couldn't the little
bugger spend a week or two by himself?). There's a bunch of details revealed
about Shizuko, some of it through nicely done grainy flashbacks. We also find
out that Ryuji can read minds a little bit. This doesn't really play much of a
role in the proceedings, but it's around this time the story starts careening
off the tracks and loses some of its effectiveness. The big discovery is that
Shizuko had a daughter. Her name is Sadako (remember the video and "Sada?").
Sadako had terrible powers far beyond those of her mother. She could simply
will people to die with her mind. They decide they need to locate Sadako to
lift this curse. That's what they're calling the whole "dying in a week" thing
- she put a "curse" on us. There is added urgency to their actions now,
because before leaving Yoichi at grandpa's house , Reiko wakes up in the middle
of the night and notices that he is not in his bed. She goes into the other
room and he has just finished watching the video tape! She asks him why he
brought the tape to grandpa's and he says simply that Tomoko told him to.
Another good scary moment! The rest of the movie is spent looking for Sadako
and they end up back at the cabin where Reiko got the telephone call. They
surmise that she was killed there and that they need to find her body to lift
the curse.  I won't go into what happens at the end (and some of you probably already think
I went into too much detail as it is), but suffice it to say, there are some
more revelations, creepy and frightening in nature, and the last scene is one
of those that will have you pondering its significance a little while after the
movie is over. The movie is quite good at what it sets out to do: it is
sometimes frightening and always unsettling and it does it with no gore and a
minimal amount of violence. It is done through the power of suggestion. Since
we're capable of conjuring up the worst terrors imaginable in our own minds,
the filmmakers decide to put that to work for them. For most of the movie,
they drop little bits of clues and details that advance the mystery and
heighten the tension. You've seen this less is more technique done in
excellent movies like Picnic At Hanging Rock and in overrated fare like The Blair Witch Project (I don't care what you say, it's just a bunch of people running around
screaming
their fool heads off in the woods, though the ending was okay). This movie
seems to be aspiring to be about something primal and unearthly in its
mysteriousness like Picnic At Hanging Rock, yet it loses a bit of its luster once the explanations start rolling in.
ESP, volcanoes, child-murder, psychic ability from beyond the grave, killer
video tapes? Sounds like a Full Moon Pictures production. Where's those
killer puppets? Everything seemed strained at the end from trying to explain
it all, the leaps of logic that Reiko and Ryuji have to make would cause
Albert Einstein to blush. You're
left trying to play catch up, sorting out the relationships and abilities of
characters that have long since died. You're left to wonder what the point of
it all is. Is it simply a ghost seeking revenge because it's p.o.ed? Is it
all just a great cosmic joke? Don't misunderstand me, I liked this movie and
think it's well worth your while, but I can't help but think how much more
entertaining and scary it could have been if they had trusted us a little more
and allowed us to fill in the blanks for ourselves at the end. The last scene is a kicker and I doubt you'll break a chain letter for a long after watching
it.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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