Runtime: 115 minutes
Directed by: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox, David Dorfman, Amber Tamblyn
From: Dreamworks
Why not start the season of scary movie watching right now?
After all, for years I've done this unofficially—I've never officially participated in the “Hooptober” festivities presented by Letterboxd user Cinemonster yet I've loved doing this on my own unconstrained by any rules and reading the lists/reviews of those that do participate. Furthermore, there's another Letterboxd deal created by someone else where people watch 99 horror movies in 3 months that began at the start of August. Thus, why the hell not start this now and conclude sometime in early November? Only at the end will I post my list and hopefully it'll be as eclectic as ever; as of now there's only a few films I am pretty certain will be on it.
As this is leaving both Netflix and the free section of Amazon Prime at the end of the month, might as well watch this now as not only do I rate the original Ring pretty highly, this is seen as the best of the American remakes of Pacific Rim Asian horror. In general the OG story is followed closely: a newspaper reporter and her son get pulled into a case involving a mysterious VHS tape that causes death seven days after anyone views it. This time, the little girl's name is Anglicized to Samara and horses are involved.
To its benefit, many of the scares in Ring are replicated here to a decent degree; thankfully the general idea of the OG work wasn't screwed up too badly. While lead mom Rachel Keller wasn't as likable as Reiko Asakawa and precocious children is a trope I am no fan of (the son is like 8 and yet refers to both his parents by their first names... “cute” it was not), otherwise this was a fine horror film. Of course, the original Ring is easy to track down and it does everything better, including the creepy vibe that permeates throughout. To its credit, the remake at least has performances from the likes of Naomi Watts & Brian Cox, not to mention Gore Verbinski before he declined once he started making Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, meaning he was good behind the camera. Moreover, they were able to create some decent scares/setpieces of their own—thus, this was still fine and from what I recall, if you love motion pictures with a gray/blue aesthetic...
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