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The Ring (Widescreen Edition)

The Ring (Widescreen Edition)

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great movie, but needs a better ending.
Review: Anyone with smarts and a taste for abstract horror will enjoy this movie. If you're looking for a blood and guts type of horror film, this is not it. But, if you're more into a psychological thrill, like The Shining, this film delivers. I don't scare easy (especially by pg-13 movies) but this movie kept me in suspense throughout the film, exept for the lackluster conclusion. I wont spoil the end for you, but it left me unsatisfied. Overall I would say the good out weighs the bad. Good flick. B+

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Scary but it can't touch the Exorcist!
Review: There's a sequence early on in "The Ring" that's a direct nod to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window," as well as an ironic take on our own culture.
In "Rear Window," Jimmy Stewart's character watches different characters in the apartment building across the way enacting little mini-dramas - blind dates, arguments, parties, and, most memorably, a murder.
In "The Ring," Naomi Watts' character does the same thing, and the joke is that in every apartment, everybody is watching television. That visual joke will take on chilling implications by the end of "The Ring," a very smart and effective horror thriller that's based on a 1998 Japanese film.
There's surprisingly few truly disturbing visions in the PG-13 film, and its very premise is an urban legend that, on the face of it, seems silly. But the telling of the tale, by director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger, is expert, creating an intense mood of dread that stays with the audience well after the final credits.

Ordinary objects - a housefly, a ladder, a pitcher of water -- are given sinister weight, and what horrors the film does show us are usually so fleeting that the mind doesn't have time to deconstruct and dismiss them as mere special effects. Images and sound are used masterfully to manipulate the audience - there's one shot of "the ring" that's so quick it's almost subliminal.
The urban legend concerns a bizarre videotape. Watch it, and your phone rings almost immediately. "Seven days," the raspy female voice on the line says. And exactly seven days later, you die.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) is attending the wake of her teenage niece, who died of mysterious but seemingly natural causes. She overhears her niece's teenage friends talking about a mysterious videotape, and that her niece's boyfriend committed suicide at exactly the same time.
She tracks down the videotape, and overcome by curiosity, watches it. And then the phone rings.
What follows is as much an engrossing mystery as a horror-thriller, as Rachel tries to figure out what the images on the tape signify. The clues are parceled out at just the right points, giving us enough information to stay engrossed while deftly leading Rachel (and the audience) down the wrong path at times.
While the film has some scary sequences, including the chilling climax and a scene involving a terrified horse on a ferry, what's really impressive about "The Ring" is the level of restraint involved. For most part, it avoids the usual cheap shocks that most horror movies fall back upon, instead sustaining a creepy mood one image at a time.
The one element of the movie that really doesn't work is Rachel's son Aidan (David Dorfman), yet another creepy little kid who can "see things". The parallels between him and Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense" are way too overt for a film that already invites comparisons to the work of M. Night Shyamalan.
Fortunately, those comparisons end up being mostly favorable ones. Some of the plot points may not hold up to post-show scrutiny, but viewers of "The Ring" are more likely to remember the haunting images more than the plot holes. Although I believe the few plot holes could mean a sequel is coming. Why you ask? Because all these little plot holes happen at the end, which is in my oppinion the scariest part. Even though this is a great scary movie, it doesn't even tough the supreme king of all scary movies, the one and only Exorcist!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: 'The Ring' resonates with true horror !!!...
Review: Mass popularity will elude it, because it has a no-name cast, cryptic tone and obscure origins: It remakes the 1998 Japanese film "Ringu," which comes from a novel by K?ji Suzuki. But if your senses haven't been dulled by slasher films and gorefests, if you're a connoisseur of psychological horror, this is your ticket.

Its premise sounds absurd, like an urban legend even high school kids would giggle over: A girl with supernatural powers imprints nightmarish visions on a video, and anyone who watches the tape dies exactly one week later.

But four students who sit through the tape for laughs all meet horrible ends at the same hour on the same day. Seattle reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts of "Mulholland Drive") smells a story and investigates, watching the tape first herself.

She doesn't worry about the danger until her son (David Dorfman) watches it, too. Then she enlists the boy's skeptical, estranged father (Martin Henderson) to find out what happened to the vanished, disturbed girl.

Ehren Kruger's scripts have all been spooky, from "Scream 3" to "Impostor." The logic and tension usually breaks down halfway through (except for the offbeat, underrated "Arlington Road"), but Kruger sustains the atmosphere in "The Ring" right up through an unexpected coda.

He and Verbinski expand upon the Japanese original, which was more direct and had fewer characters and a different murderer. A few new scenes are filler, especially a ferry ride where a horse goes berserk; its computer-generated death is harrowing and unnecessary. But most of the additions help us understand the girl's fate and motives more clearly.

Verbinski knows how to set up the easy scares - say, a high schooler opening a door onto a scene of horror - and the trickier ones, showing enough of the video each time to creep us out without grossing us out. The nastiest bit, severed fingers wriggling in a box, looks like an image from a Salvador Dali painting. Verbinski replicates the money shot from the Japanese version - you'll know which I mean when you see it - though he dilutes its impact by giving us a minor taste of it earlier.

Veterans Brian Cox and Jane Alexander have small but crucial roles as the girl's troubled father and her sad-eyed psychiatrist.
The little kid is equally creepy as is the girl. I can't wait for the sequel!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The Ring is good.
Review: An ironic point about this lightly-impressionistic horror movie from director Gore Verbinski is that there is practically none -- gore that is. Imagine that in a horror movie these days.

Now imagine that the gore-free horror film The Ring is actually scarier than all the Scream sequels combined.
But to see a horror film that doesn't spend 90 minutes constantly blowing its wad with Halloween monsters, latex, knives and bloody syrup is such a strange experience now, you can't blame some people for struggling for a frame of reference.

The stereotypical opening promises little -- a couple of pajama-partying teenage girls trying to scare each other with an urban legend, a video that kills anyone who sees it within seven days. The capper is a mysterious phonecall from the Angel of Death, received seconds after the vid goes snowy. The Ring trades run-of-the-mill revulsion for extreme unease, starting with the mysterious video itself -- a montage of stark, black-and-white grotesqueries and symbolic objects, including dead horses, maggots that morph into writhing bodies, a giant centipede, a haunted-looking woman, a falling ladder and a suicide. It looks like a lost Guy Maddin film. This is a truly scary movie!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A serverly under-rated film!
Review: "The Ring" is a merciless thriller, threateningly beautiful to look at and eerie to behold. Director Verbinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger. Every scene and every shot of "The Ring," the smart American remake of the popular 1998 Japanese horror film "Ringu," contains a nearly suffocating feeling of dread. It weighs down heavily on the characters' lives and the viewer's head, refusing to let up. Directed by Gore Verbinski (2001's "The Mexican") with a sharp eye for visual detail and a keen sense of generating suspense, the film is a creepy and considerably unsettling experience that works its way deeply under your skin. The frightening prologue is a real attention-grabber. During a sleepover, two teenage girls, Katie (Amber Tamblyn) and Becca (Rachael Bella), discuss a legend involving a videotape in which, the moment you finish watching it, you receive a telephone call informing you that you have seven days to live. After Katie informs Becca that she watched it exactly a week ago, things grow quite dire. Enter single mother and news reporter Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), who is asked by her sister (Lindsay Frost) to investigate the circumstances surrounding daughter Katie's mysterious sudden death. Rachel's research ultimately leads her to the infamous tape in question. When she watches it and, to her horror, receives the cryptic phone call, the countdown to her impending death begins. Unless Rachel can find out where the tape originated and put a stop to the curse, she faces the same fate as her unfortunate niece. The Ring" is a superbly crafted horror film that, rare to form, does not lessen the impact or dumb down its foreign counterpart. Not overly violent and with almost no gore, the unshakable effectiveness it mutters up comes from what is hinted at, but not seen. This tactic works magnificently, since the characters themselves are faced with something that they do not understand. The opening scene, for example, has a setup similar to 1996's "Scream," but instead of ending in a bloodbath, opts for nothing more than a horrific sense of not knowing what to expect. Another sequence involving a crazed horse that gets loose on a barge headed for an island is spectacularly tense and imaginative. WARNING: This is for smart people only, not those who liked films like Scream.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is scary!
Review: "Before you die, you see the ring." Sounds like a great tagline for a story on the Hope Diamond, but the ring in this case is representative of many things -- the insistent ring of a dreaded telephone call. The white, bloodshot ring around the eye of a terrified horse. The misty ring of an eclipse as your vision fades and your life slips away. The circular ring which has no beginning and no end. The Ring starts off like a your typical horror teen flick -- two nubile young ladies are alone in the house for a sleepover. One tells the other about an urban legend: somewhere out there, she says, is a videotape that, once viewed, leaves you with only 7 days left to live...be prepared to cling to the edge of your seat, tense with suspense...So if you are a true human being, you'll watch this with an open mind, and alone in the dark. Everyone I've talked too said that this movie was scary, and I think this is scary, so what's up with all the bad reviews? Plot holes? The few plot holes in this movie were left there in order to make a sequel. DUH!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good, but scary and wrong in some parts
Review: I saw this in theatres 3 times, and it was good. It was only scary the first time, but it was definitely scary then. Parts of it are horribly wrong, because it's something you would never think of happening and you will most likely think that the director has mental problems. Although it was scary and had a story line that was both confusing and just wrong at times, it was worth watching. I would watch it again in a second, but be prepared that the plot was confusing at times and the story line was just scary and evil throughout most of the movie.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Boring
Review: while i was watching it in the theater all the people around me were getting scred but i had a really hard time telling what was supposed to be scary and having a hard time staying awake. I would have to say that the only cool think in the movie was how the girl died in the begining.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Never Get Married!
Review: Wait, that ring has nothing to do with "The Ring." Based upon the novel by Koji Suzuki, a person watches a videotape, they die within a week! Evility! Disturbing images appear and then people die in mysterious ways with their mouths gaping open like a fish-out-of-water! I won't get into the specifics, but this movie will give a couple of good jolts and you'll maybe endure tinkle time! Very creepy, far more superior to most horror films nowadays. Avoid "Fear Dot Com" at all costs and watch this instead.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: One of the best recent horror films
Review: Just when you thought horror films would never be good again, "The Ring" comes about to save the genre.

The story about a video tape that leads the viewers death seven days later could have been hokey, but "The Ring" isn't that at all. The film's strength lies on its mood and atmosphere, with the plot, acting and dialogue all good enough to keep the film afloat without detracting from its creepy fun. With a predominately blue/green tint all throughout the film and plenty of fog, rain and gloom, "The Ring" takes place in an unsettling world. The disturbing images in the videotape alone are enough for nightmare fodder, and perfectly put the viewer's nerve on edge for the film.

Sure the plot may have some holes in it, it's not the films strong point, but it's enough to carry us through to the end without questioning it too much (How often can you say that about any horror film). There's a taste of "The Blair Witch Project" here, taking more of it's creepy mood rather then its fleeting novelty, and barely any gore to speak of (though plenty of frightening visuals).

Anyone tired of the same-old horror retread will find much to be fearful of in "The Ring." And plenty of nightmares that night.


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