| Ring, The Released: 2002 MPAA Rating: R Genre: Ghost Nuts and Bolts: What better way to promote the distribution of DVD technology than to feature a film where characters who watch a certain video tape die within seven days of viewing it? Oh yeah…and there's a little matter of a ghost too. Summary: We start off with two teenage girls named Katie and Becca who are having a slumber party. Becca begins telling Katie about this urban legend concerning a videotape. Supposedly, if you watch this tape you will receive a phone call from someone who will tell you that you will die within seven days of viewing it. Katie grows concerned and reveals that her boyfriend Josh and she watched the tape last weekend. She then begins convulsing and shaking all over the place. Becca begins freaking out until she learns that Katie is just fucking with her. They both become alarmed when the downstairs telephone rings. But never fear…it is only Katie's mom Ruthie calling to check up on them. Katie begins walking back upstairs when she notices a pool of water growing outside her bedroom door. She opens the door and her face contorts into an expression of terror as she begins screaming. No one knows what it is that Katie sees. Now we flash forward to three days later. Here we meet Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts). Rachel is a blonde-haired thirty-something with a creepy little kid named Aidan. Aidan was a cousin with Katie who we now learn has died due to mysterious circumstances. Not only were they cousins, but they were best friends as well (Yeah right, like anybody would believe that. This kid is the most unlikable little fuck in all of movie history. He actually makes Jake Lloyd seem interesting. I'd rather hang out with that fat little Dursley kid from the Harry Potter books than associate with this little pusbag. But that's neither here nor there.) Anyway, Aidan's teacher calls Rachel into school to discuss some issues with her. Rachel assures the teacher that she is doing everything she can to help Aidan through this difficult time, but the teacher is concerned because Aidan is drawing these funky little crayon doodles of his dead cousin. Rachel doesn't think that it is really all that strange, but for the fact that he began drawing these creepy little pics a week prior to Katie's death. Shades of Haley Joel Osment! So now we move ahead to Katie's funeral. Rachel learns that no one can explain the reason for Katie's death. She also discovers that Katie's friend Becca went totally bugfuck and has been remanded to a loony house. Now Rachel is a reporter, so naturally her curiosity arouses her journalism instinct. She begins interviewing people at the funeral. She learns that Katie and her boyfriend Josh watched this mythical videotape a week prior to their deaths. Yes, that's right. Josh is dead as well. They say it was a suicide, but you and I know better don't we kiddies? So she decides to investigate this matter on her own. She picks up some photographs that Katie had taken down at the photomat (I wonder if Robin Williams was working there that day). When she looks at the group photo of Katie and her friends she notices that all of their faces are distorted. Driven even further, she journeys up to the mountain cabin where the teens had been cavorting the weekend prior. She finagles her way into renting the exact same cabin they had used. Once inside, she finds the videotape. She plays the thing and we are treated to a cornucopia of strange black and white images including things like: A portrait of a woman, two dead horses in the sea, a box full of severed thumbs, a ladder, a tree, a chair, and a wraithlike image of a girl in a mirror. Immediately after the tape stops playing the telephone rings. Rachel answers it and an eerie voice says to her, "You will die in seven days". Freaked out, Rachel grabs the tape and heads back to town. Now we start with the slow countdown to Rachel's final moments. Day One (Thursday): Rachel's ex-beau (And father to her child) Noah stops over at her apartment. She describes what she has been doing but is reluctant to show him the tape. But Noah presses the issue until finally Rachel says, "Fuck it" and lets him watch the tape. The telephone rings immediately after, but she refuses to answer it. The creepy little urchin on the other end even goes so far as to LEAVE A MESSAGE ON HER ANSWERING MACHINE! Anyway, Rachel takes the tape to work and makes a copy. Day Two (Friday): Rachel goes to Noah's studio. Noah is something of a photography expert. She tries to get him to divine the origins of the tape and he agrees to analyze it. He babbles a bunch of video geek nonsense but the long and short of it is that he can't figure out where the tape came from. But now we meet Beth, the NEW girlfriend. Rachel is obviously not completely over her ex-boyfriend because she storms out of the place in a huff (Not surprising, she's something of a bitch). As she storms out onto the street, she sees a large extension ladder leaning against the building. This reminds her of the ladder she saw on the videotape. Day Three (Saturday): Rachel visits Becca in the mental institution. Becca is completely fucked up ass over elbows and can't even so much a look at a television without freaking out. She talks to Rachel and tells her, "She will show you in four days". Rachel assumes this is in reference to the voice on the telephone. She takes the tape to a lab where she analyzes it at greater detail. She freezes on of the frames where she finds the half-cropped image of a lighthouse. Day Four (Sunday): So now Rachel is stuck with this lighthouse image inside her head. She goes down to the library and researches lighthouses. As luck would have it, she happens to find the exact one she's looking for on a local resort known as Moesko Island. She researches the island and learns that a woman named Anna Morgan used to train horses there. A lot of horses have turned up mysteriously dead over the last couple of years. Anna herself died some time ago. Rachel recognizes Anna's image from the videotape. In the image, Anna commits suicide by jumping off of a high cliff. Day Five (Monday): Both Rachel and Noah begin to experience bizarre physical affects due to watching the film. They both suffer chronic nosebleeds as well as having their images distorted whenever someone takes a picture of them. Rachel even coughs up a fucking electrode if you can believe that. She also has a fucked up dream where she sees an image of a young girl who grabs her on the arm. When she awakens from the dream, she notices that she has a hand-shaped burn mark across her arm. So now she goes into the living room and guess what she finds? Yup. That little fuck face Aidan is watching the goddamn copy that Rachel made of the videotape. She freaks out and tosses the thing under a chair. The telephone starts ringing and she refuses to answer it (I'm surprised no one ever thought to Star-69 this bitch). The phone rings a second time and this time its Noah. He believes her now. Day Six (Tuesday): Noah and Rachel decide to take the ferry out to Moesko Island. The ferry has a horse stable on it and one of the horses breaks out and commits suicide. Yes, the horse actually fucking commits suicide. He races all about the deck before flopping his fat ass into the sea. Once they get to the island the two split up. Noah breaks into the local mental house and steals some records regarding Anna Morgan. Rachel goes to the Morgan farm and meets Anna's widower Richard. Richard explains to her how no one knows exactly why all the horses started dying. She asks about the tape and Richard starts getting fidgety. She begins to understand that the little girl from the videotape is Richard and Anna's daughter. Although she posits the idea to the old man, Richard denies having a daughter. So now Rachel leaves and visits another person on the island. This would be Doctor Grasnik. Grasnik reveals that Anna and Richard once adopted a daughter named Samara. This was done after several attempts at having a natural child failed. No one truly knows where Samara came from. All she knows is is that Samara was remanded to a mental health clinic where she inexplicably died one day. Grasnik isn't very forthcoming with the details. So Rachel high-tails it back to the Morgan farm. She finds an old videotape (A different one) of one of Samara's sessions at the hospital. The info on the tape isn't very comprehensive, but we do learn that Samara holds resentment for her adoptive father and is someway tied to the strange equine deaths. Now because Rachel is a dumbass, she allows the old man to sneak up behind her. He thumps her skull and steals the television. Yeah, I know. It's HIS television, but what can you do? He runs upstairs with the TV and Rachel chases after him. He mumbles some nonsense about how Anna wasn't supposed to have a child and then he commits suicide. He does this by plugging the TV into a surge protector and then jumping into a bathtub full of water with it. I guess those surge protectors aren't so protective after all, eh? By this point, Noah catches up with her and the two go into the family barn. They find a hayloft above the horse stables, which is apparently where Samara was forced to sleep. They investigate the loft and find a little bed as well as the image of a tree burned into the wall beneath the wallpaper. Rachel recognizes the exact shape and form of the tree as being identical to one that exists outside Shelter Inn (The place where the original teens died in the beginning of the flick). How Rachel recognized this one specific tree is beyond me, but I guess the director thought this act of convenience was enough to propel an already convoluted story. Day Seven (Wednesday): So Rachel and Noah go to Shelter Inn. They dig up the floorboards to discover that a well is buried underneath. They remove the 'ring'-shaped well cover and toss it to the side. Did I mention that the cover was in the shape of a ring? A RING dammit! A bloody fucking RINGGGGG! Did I emphasize the foreshadowing enough here folks? Anyway, the well is very deep and very dark. Rachel naturally falls into the fucker. While she's sloshing around in the shit, she comes upon…Samara's ROTTING FUCKING CORPSE BABY! As soon as she touches the little skank her mind is flooded with nasty vile images. We see a flashback of Samara's mother Anna wrapping a plastic bag over chickie's head and tossing her ass into the well. The Morgan's then had the Shelter Inn built overtop of the well so that no one would ever find out what happened to Samara. Apparently this kid was just an A-1 fucking whacko from start to finish. She was driving her mother literally crazy, which in turn pissed off the old man. That's why Papa Morgan kept the little tart locked up in the hayloft. But Samara grew jealous of the old man's boner for horses and so she used her funky voodoo to make all the horses get sick and die. Presumably this is the same reason why the horse on the ferry decided to Kevorkian himself. But what Anna never knew, was that her daughter survived being chucked into the well. She lived for seven days. Noah finally rescues Rachel from the well and the two believe that everything is over and done with. They think that by opening the well, they are letting Samara's spirit go. The following day, Rachel explains all of this to her boy Aidan (Who has this habit of calling his mother by her first name which I don't quite understand). Now apparently Aidan has been hearing Samara's voice from time to time and has a bit of insight into what exactly this freaky little bitch is all about. But when Rachel tells him that she set Samara's spirit free, Aidan freaks out. He explains to her that Samara is an evil little twist and she actually ended up doing more harm than good. Now let's cut to Noah. Noah is dicking about his studio when all of a sudden the television comes on. It's an image from the videotape of the well. We see Samara crawling out of the well and she reaches out and literally crawls her ass out of the television set! Why Carol Anne Freeling never thought of this I'll never know. She kills Noah and we later find him with the same foobarred contorted face that Katie ended up with in the beginning of the flick. Rachel and Aidan go to Noah's place but it's too late. There's nothing they can do. Rachel recalls one of Samara's sound bytes from the hospital tape "She just wants to be heard". So Rachel finds her copy of the home video and makes another copy. It is her intention to distribute it to as many people as possible thus assuring that neither She nor Aidan suffer Samara's curse. Acting/Dialogue: Everyone does a fine job at pretending to be a selfish little cum burper. Seriously, it's really difficult to get behind any of these characters. But that shouldn't be leveled as a slight against the actors, I'm sure it takes a lot of hard work and practice to be that obnoxious. Naomi Watts tries once again to show us that she can be a 'serious' actress who doesn't rely on steamy lesbian love scenes in order to get people to notice her. What she fails to realize however, is that steamy lesbian love scenes is what has made this chick a household name! Don't believe me? Okay…what is the VERY first thing you think of when I say the words… Mulholland Drive? If you say Billy Ray Cyrus, then you're a liar. But even though the Ring is sans-lesbo, Naomi still succeeds in proving that she's got the right stuff to make it happen. The rest of the cast is pretty much your standardized WB/Dawson's Creek/Everwood inspired pretty faces. The character of Noah is straight out of an episode of Gilmore Girls and Katie and Becca may as well be stunt doubles for the cast of Charmed. Daveigh Chase plays the part of Samara. And even though she does come through on the 'creepy' bit, I don't feel the role was really that challenging for her. For the most part all she has to do is stand around in a dripping wet dress with her hair hanging in front of her face. Hell, I do that every day and no one is putting ME in a movie! The most annoying character is of course, the snotty little kid and his snotty little babysitter. They're both so filled with snot that I feel the urge to hold a handkerchief up to the television screen whenever either one of them makes an appearance. Gore: Not really much going on here. We really don't see the death scenes all that closely and for the most part they consist of nothing more than some greasepaint and contorted facial expressions. One of the images from the videotape shows a box of severed fingers. There's also a fairly graphic scene where a crazed horse commits suicide by barreling his dumb ass off the side of a boat. As he crashes into the water, his body gets swept under and the motors pretty much take care of the rest. I bet those little pussies from PETA shit themselves silly when they saw that. Guilty Pleasures: Okay, I've already mentioned how Naomi Watts doesn't do a steamy lesbian love scene in this flick right? No need to read any further. The Good: As many of you probably know, the Ring is an American remake of the 1998 Japanese horror film Ringu. Now, while I have yet to see Ringu I have a hard time believing that Japan could belt out a horror movie that doesn't involve thirty-story tall fire-breathing foam rubber mutant dinosaurs. But if the remake is any indication as to the quality of the original, I think its safe to say that the thirty-story tall fire-breathing foam rubber dinosaurs were taking the day off when this flick was made. Whether or not that is a good or a bad thing is for you to decide. Unlike most modern American horror pictures, the Ring doesn't involve a masked silent serial killer who rises from the dead time after time no matter how much you beat the shit out of him. It also doesn't involve a cast of pimply faced angst ridden hormonally challenged teenagers who were too butt ugly to fill in as guest spots on an episode of Friends. With that in mind, this movie represents a breath of only semi-polluted air. It's refreshing to know that the main villain of this flick isn't really concerned with what you did during the summer and could really give a flying fuck about how loud you scream as you are on your way to your final destination. The true motivations behind Samara's actions are enshrouded in mystery. The format that director Gore Verbinski (love that name) uses here works pretty well. He starts you off with your stereotypical teen horror fest, but just as you are ready to spew your imitation popcorn butter flavored topping onto the slime crusted theater floor, he throws a curve ball your way. Now, assuming that you are deft enough to avoid being smacked in the teeth with said curve ball, you will find that he slowly begins to weave a compelling mystery surrounding the eerie deaths of a select group of partiers. The joyous thing is that the main thrust of the movie doesn't really involve these dickwad teens at all. They are really just a MagGuffin thrown in there to kick-start the story. Within fifteen minutes, the movie shifts from the Katie/Becca perspective to that of Rachel. It's fun watching her trying to balance sensibility with the inane truths that she uncovers concerning the videotape. Verbinski is very conscious of his perspective from this point out and nearly everything that follows is from Rachel's point of view. He peppers her character with enough spices to make her tasty enough, but he doesn't dump the whole friggin' jar of oregano on her, you know what I'm saying? Her identity and sense of purpose are very tastefully defined in this film. Too many movies rely on endless character development and by the time you're done learning everything about them, you have forgotten just what the hell it is you are watching in the first place. Now the story itself isn't overly complex, but we are allowed the ability to follow along with Rachel and pick things up as she goes. Verbinski succeeds in keeping your attention the entire time. He never spends too much time away from Rachel and even when he does, the scenes flow seamlessly with whatever stage of the investigation she is working on at any particular moment. Overall, this movie is heavy on the meat and doesn't let the potatoes run around hurly-burly on the plate. And when you're done, feel free to wash it all down with a good ole helping of the original Ringu. Hmmm. Okay, I think I've satisfied my quota of food references for this review. Let's move on shall we? The Bad: Okay, you know when you're driving down the road minding your own business when all of a sudden you see your retarded neighbor's pet cat dart out in front of you? You can easily swerve or brake sharply to avoid hitting him, but why put forth so much extra effort for a pet that belongs to an individual that you don't really like to begin with? So rather than swerving, you instead jam on the accelerator making sure to smear Fluffy's calico covered ass all over Church Street. But imagine your surprise when you glance into the rear view mirror to admire your handiwork only to find the little fuck is still alive! Sure, his spine is completely twisted halfway around his ass and maybe he don't hear so good anymore, but the fact that you can still hear his pathetic mewling mouth completely disavows any joy you may have felt from plastering his mangy carcass to begin with! So you then decide to do what any honorable conscientious citizen of the community would feel pressed to do; you back up. You smile slightly as your rear tire raises a few inches off the ground cementing the idea in your head that the bastard cat of all bastard cats must surely be dead now. But you're a bit paranoid by this point, so you pull your vehicle off to the side of the road and park. You get out and walk over just to be sure that the thing is completely and truly deceased. Now just as you begin to dance on the remains of the grease smear in the road, your retarded fucking neighbor comes running out of his house screeching whatever retard noises he is wont to make while slapping the shit out of you with his floppy little useless flipper arms. So now you have an angry retard belting your ass. You don't want to strike back, because slapping retards might be considered cruel, so you pretty much just stand there and take it until he gets it out of his system. By the time the entire ordeal is over you get back into your car having savored none of the pleasures you expected to achieve from this affair. You're not even thinking about Garfield the roadkill anymore, you're just trying to figure out a way to explain to your buddies how you ended up with a busted lip without having to reveal to them the fact that you just got the shit kicked out of you by a guy who can't even wipe his own ass correctly. By the end of the night, you remember none of the good but all of the bad. What does all of this have to do with the Ring? More than you would expect I imagine. Now it is one thing to make a 'Bad' movie. Horror movie enthusiasts know that better than anyone else. Every day we find ourselves playing Russian Roulette at the video store wondering whether or not the straight-to-video zombie movie we have in our hands is going to be a total shitfest or not. Most times we simply find ourselves pondering, "I wonder how bad it will be" rather than "This movie looks fucking killer dude!" But I can forgive most 'Bad' movies. Mostly, because they don't make any pretense about being anything other than total crappage. The true gems are the stereotypically 'bad' movies, which actually produce the best efforts possible given the hands they are dealt. This is why I rate Toxic Avenger so high on my head-o-meter. It's a 'bad' movie that manages to turn crap into something beautiful. But what pops my pimple most of all is when you have a 'good' movie that turns 'bad' within the last twenty minutes. Such is the case with the Ring. For the first hour or so, this flick has it all! Drama, suspense, mystery, and the occasional 'boo' moments. But when it comes to the spit or swallow portion of the climax, I find that the Ring is most definitely a spitter. Now while there are plenty of movies that maintain their value by being abstract or ambiguous, that kind of storytelling is not called for with the Ring. It's a mystery, and as such should provide us with a clearly defined solution. The villain in this movie is the ghost of a little nipple nibbler named Samara. Apparently Samara was quite the twisted little beeyatch in her breathing days. We have no idea why she is so fucked up and it's pretty apparent that the kid was mental even before being confined to a hayloft. So what made this chick flip like a burger? Absolutely no explanation is even hinted upon. What's even stranger than her origin is her sense of priority. What the hell is she trying to get out of all of this? There's one cryptic little piece of dialogue where Samara whines, "I just want to be heard!" Wah wah wah. You think you've got problems? Go to a Star Trek convention or to the tryouts for the Special Olympics! There you will find people that have REAL problems. In one hand, you have these special-needs assholes that can't function by themselves or even eat a tasty cake without keeping the cream filling from spilling down their oversized lips onto their shit-smeared t-shirts. But they are strong willed individuals despite their handicaps and they just laugh it off. And the Special Olympics candidates are even WORSE! Holy Christ Samara, as we speak our nation is on the verge of going to war with an Arab country over some fairly intense and not-so-clearly defined reasons, so pardon me if I choose to be less than a little empathetic towards your particularly trite and under whelming predicament. You want to be heard? You want to be HEARD? Then build a fucking website like I did you little fucking Nancy and quite your bellyaching! That's the problem with dead people you know? They think that just because they're dead, that they are more important than you or I. I tell you, there is nothing more obnoxious in this world than catching shit from a fricking ghost. Well…maybe getting your ass kicked by a retard might be slightly worse…but you get the picture. I guess we're supposed to feel bad for Samara, but I don't see how we can. She's a little fricking fruit-loop! Maybe if she weren't completely sack of hammers, her mother wouldn't have pitched her ass into that well. This is one instance where you can't blame the parents. In my eyes, the little bitch was getting off light. How did she get inside the videotape anyway? Is she time-sharing with Carol Anne Freeling? (That's a Poltergeist reference in case you didn't know.) And why a videotape? This is the new millennium baby-doll. We're in the year twenty aught three and videotapes are slowly becoming as extinct as the afore mentioned foam rubber dinosaurs. Why isn't she trying to possess a DVD or an MP3 player? Hell, even a laserdisc would be slightly more 'cutting-edge' than some old ass Betamax tape. Let's move on to Rachel. She's a real firecracker ain't she? She's pretty bitter too. Big surprise. All single mothers are bitter. It's like a fricking' rule or something. They're so pissed off because they're eighteen year old boyfriend knocked them up and dumped them like a turd when they were just fourteen that they feel the need to take it out on the world. Now I'm not saying that Rachel isn't deserving of some attitude. After all, her boy-toy Noah is pretty much a deadbeat as well. I'm sure he deserves every single derision that she can possibly squeeze into an articulated sentence. But the placement of her bitterness is a little, shall we say…extreme? Rachel KNOWS that watching the tape is tantamount to certain death and she shows it to him anyway. And on top of that, she gives him ATTITUDE! Now I understand that you're pissed because Mister Studly stepped out on you ten years back or so, but Christ on a pogo stick, isn't a decade a bit long to be carrying a grudge? I thought only Harvard grad republican Presidential hopefuls did that. I wouldn't be so hard on Rachel but for the fact that she tries to get back with him later. Sure it's kind of subtle and never given the chance to blossom, but the earmarks are all there. They give each other the 'cutesy' eyes and Rachel places her hand over top of Noah's. So let me get this straight. Just because the guy hauls your dumb ass out of a pit, you're going to give it up to him again? What happened to all the rage? What happened to all the bitterness? You can't just wipe that shit away overnight. Especially not after its been festering lo these many years. Aww who am I kidding? The only REAL reason that I'm bagging on her is because Naomi Watts didn't show us her tits and go down on some amnesiac single white female like she did in Mulholland Drive. I think we should make fun of the kid now. Why you ask? Because making fun of children is cool and it makes me feel superior. And realistically, is there any reason why I SHOULDN'T make fun of this babbling little aborted blowjob? The fact that he calls his mom by her first name is enough to make you put his face through a window. Add to that the fact that he seems to have all the dirt on Samara but never feels the need to fucking TELL anybody! On top of that, he gives his mom shit for doing what she felt was the 'right' thing. Maybe if this little smart-ass had contributed more to his family environment aside from lip service, he might have been able to prevent his father's death. But noooooooo…this little Cole Sear wannabe decides that he wants to be 'mysterious'. This was probably some half-ass attempt at cultivating a more loving relationship between his mother and he. If I were this kid's mom I would've made him watch that video tape seven times in a row in the hopes that maybe his death will be seven times as painful. And speaking of the videotape, does anyone think it odd that Rachel never once thought to erase the fucker? That's the first thing that would've popped into my head. Personally I probably would have smuggled it in to Hollywood video and swapped it out for a Teletubbies tape or something. Just for kicks. Now I suppose everyone hates me now because I just bagged on their favorite movie. But let's be real for a moment. Is it your favorite movie because you genuinely like it, or is it your favorite because Carson Daly told you that it should be? No matter what your answer turns out to be, you would be wrong. The Ring has a lot of great stuff to it, but in the end it falls apart like one of those shitty house of cards that guidance counselors are always building inside their offices when they think you're not looking. Great Lines "She wanted that child more than anything in the world. How could she have done that...? She just wanted to be heard. Sometimes children yell, or cry... or draw pictures..." --Rachel Keller "Here we go, the world is spinning. When it stops, it's just beginning. Sun comes up, we all laugh. Sun goes down, we all die..." --Samara Morgan Overall Rating: 6 out of 10 severed heads. |
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