THE RING (2002)
Even though this movie was made in the infancy of digital home video technology, I'm glad the filmmakers went with a cursed VHS tape as opposed to a haunted DVD or something. Interestingly enough, I had never seen Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" until fairly recently. I'm very glad I waited this modern staple of the horror genre. It features a stellar cast, awesome direction, a very moody score from Hans Zimmer, and a pretty terrifying concept of chasing down your demons before they catch up to you. Not bad for modern entertainment.
Naomi Watts plays Rachel, a divorced mother who is suddenly dealing with the death of her niece, Katie. The circumstances surrounding her death are mysterious and very bizarre. In the opening scene of the film, we get to see the fate of what happened to her. Katie and her friend Becca discuss a supposedly cursed video cassette that results in the viewers receiving a phone call that tell them they will die in seven days. Still, not as bad as getting calls from telemarketers or the county Republican party (that gives me the chills). Rachel is a journalist, who begins to investigate and is lead to the cabin at a remote motel where Katie and her friends watched this supposed tape. After viewing it, Rachel receives the call and begins to have nightmares, nosebleeds, and hallucinations.
Rachel's son Aidan (David Dorfman) is badly affected by the death of his cousin and exhibits bizarre behavior at school, drawing pictures of a girl being buried underground. Dorfman is exceptional in the role. After closely examining the video, she decides to try and track down the lighthouse seen in one section of the tape's evil frames (yes, the concept is ridiculous if you think about it). The film uses a common plot technique, which is setting up a time frame in which the events occur, giving the movie a sense of drive leading toward a definite finish. After having seen the video, Rachel has only seven days to track down the people behind this mysterious video and find out how to stop it. The events escalate when she makes a copy for the purposes of her investigation and her Aidan gets ahold of it. And when do you get caught with dirty videotapes? When you leave them in the VCR, so of course, he watches it.
Naomi Watts and David Dorfman in Gore Verbinski's "The Ring"
Now, what this film does so brilliantly is that it takes a really silly idea and makes it scary without going over-the-top or exaggerating any aspects of its story. "The Number 23" is a film that comes to mind in which a very cool, eerie concept is done in the worst possible and over-acted way. This movie works and that comes across just from the scene in which the characters watch the evil tape. The movie within the movie itself is very disturbing. Ladders, spinning chairs, a mysterious well, and a woman brushing her hair. Also, not every scene is a done in a traditional horror sense. One of the best scenes in the film is when Rachel is following a lead on the tape and has a run in with a horse aboard a ferry transporting her to her destination. It's exquisitely shot.
The suspense toward the end of the film that involves having to uncover some floor boards feels like a pseudo-John Carpenter sequence. The mysterious woman seen on the videotape is Anna Morgan, an identity discovered after Rachel investigates the lighthouse further. Anna supposedly killed herself after all of the horses on her ranch supposedly went crazy and drowned themselves, leaving her in a state of depression. Anna could not conceive, so she and her husband Richard (played by the extremely versatile Brian Cox) adopted a daughter named Samara, who soon brought on strange visions and misfortunes to her mother. Her fate also remained a mystery.
Verbinski left us the seeds here that he would show us once more only a few years later in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" (which he would then go on to exploit in the later sequels). To get really critical, I noticed that Verbinski, in this film at least, centers a lot of the subjects of his shot right in the center of frame. To me, this has never looked "right". What I mean is that you will usually find subjects are a little off-center either to the left or right, using the rule of thirds. Perhaps it was just me, but that really weirded me out. Bojan Bozelli's cinematography is also very key to the feel of the picture: gloomy, dark, and gray.
Hans Zimmer is at the top of his game with the score for this film. It isn't hard to hear why he's one of the top composer's in Hollywood. In the early 2000's, Zimmer could do no wrong, in my opinion. As a musician, this score is exactly what I favor for a film. When it needed to be, it was terrifying, quiet, sympathetic and works fine without the film, a rarity for a Hans Zimmer score.
But the terror behind this whole thing, the idea of the evil tape, is perfect. But it's also silly. For those of us old enough to remember browsing at video stores (I come on the scene just in time to witness the death of VHS), the artwork on the package was sometimes a big part of why we would pick something up or pass it altogether. However, the idea of a mysterious, unmarked cursed tape that anyone, young or old can come across and watch freaks me out.
7/10
THE RING - Rated R
- Directed by Gore Verbinski
- Written by Koji Suzuki, Ehren Kruger, and Scott Frank
- Runtime - 115 minutes
- 7.1 stars on IMDb
- 71% on Rotten Tomatoes
Links
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298130/
- http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ring/
- 1 Disc DVD currently priced at $5.49 on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment