Yar, you be here: The Ring (Widescreen Edition) > Customer Reviews

The Ring (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (82 - 84 of 102 Reviews)

pleasingly creepy
Adapted from the Japanese "Ringu", "The Ring" is a stylish and consistently chilling flick centered on a mysterious videotape whose viewers mysteriously die. Rachel Keller (the lovely Naomi Watts, late of "Mulholland Drive") is an investigative reporter who looks into the mysterious case of the tape when her niece falls victim (her heart just stops, her face frozen in some expression of limitless fright). Along with the niece, several of her friends also turn up dead - succumbing on the same date and time. Very much a reporter in the tradition of that guy on "The Incredible Hulk", Rachel trudges off to a remote island cabin where the victims were last together - and finds the tape. Though containing only a short movie, the tape is nightmarish - scary without resort to shocks, it's a pastiche of ominously surreal images (dark landscapes, torn fingers, an old well, a woman combing her hair in front of a mirror that doesn't reflect a camera, another falling off a cliff, worms, ladders, flies - very Dali-esque). Immediately after watching the tape, Keller gets a phone call - a childlike voice tells her she will die in seven days. Rachel turns for help to her young son, a gifted but incredibly dark boy who seems to have an affinity for the dark force that threatens Rachel. She also reaches out to an ex-boyfriend, a video engineer whose initial skepticism guarantees that he too will watch the tape. Soon she begins to succumb to the power of the ring - she becomes distorted on pictures, and finds herself blackening out faces on pictures as her niece had. Racing the clock (okay, the calendar) Rachel pieces together the cryptic images into a chain of clues, which lead her to a dark island (the flick was filmed both in the northwest and in Massachusetts, but manage to consistently bring out the creepier aspects of each) and a secret that won't stay hidden.

I loved this flick, and couldn't disagree more with the amazon.com review that found it burdened by "lofty pretensions" (doubtlessly Jeff Shannon enjoyed "Se7en", an overblown chiller which was pretentious, overburdened by cheap thrills and a reliance on Hollywood's stereotype of the apocalyptic biblical psychopath - but one nearly universally praised). The script preserves a perfect sense of dread between the shocks, while the cinematography doesn't resort to cheap chills (it's both chilling and refreshing that shocking imagery is unaccompanied by shocking sound effects - the film could have been titled "Silent Scream") and actually understates its jabs. You may spend most of your viewing time just scanning frames (and it's worth it, more reason to spring for the DVD) to capture its enigmatic and disturbing visions. Rather than pretentious, the script taps into primal emotions - fear and regret - bred by the chaotic lives people quietly live. The script isn't overly wordy, nor does it have Rachel try to turn the tale-of-the-tape into a metaphor for some typical Hollywood philosophy. The editing may look sloppy - there are numerous scenes which don't otherwise fit into the plot, signs of scenes or sub-plots which were never finished or simply cut (like an ominous stranger that Rachel's son sees on a rainy street, or a scene in which a horse goes berserk while being ferried to an island)and some sound effects clash with the onscreen images (like the scream we hear from a girl on the ferry, despite the fact that she's covering her mouth), but I think it's a deliberate effect meant to highlight the entropy at the edge of Rachel's life, and remind us that there's more going on then we can see with our own eyes. Though much of "The Ring" may come off as non-sensical, the script weaves a complex yarn - like a puzzle, its pieces uncannily come together. With its many visual cues, the film is incredibly re-watchable, and come closest to that cinematographic ideal of telling a story entirely with pictures. I haven't seen "fear.com" but don't feel the need to compare this flick to it. If you need a good chill, embrace the power of the ring.

This is one of the creepiest things I have ever seen!
I have seen this many times and each time it creeps me out. There is not really any blood or gore (except for the horse), but this movie doesn't need it. It is scary enough with just the story and the psychological stuff. And the first time you see it, it really is a mystery, and the pieces fit together really well. The acting is great, especially the kid's acting. And I found the storyline to be rather solid.

I recommend you watch this if you haven't already.

Scared the crap out of me
The slasher films that have been around since the late 1970s have never really scared me. Sure Jason and Freddy were kind of creepy and could come up with some really interesting ways to kill people, but there was just something about them that didn't scare me and keep me up all night. The movies that always scared me were the ones that messed with your head and you couldn't figure out what in the hell was happening. "The Ring" is definitely one of those kinds of movies.

A brief summary of the plot is easy to do. There's a videotape and if you watch it, you will die. You watch it, then the phone rings, and then a spooky voice tells you that you have seven days to live. That's a freaky enough premise as it is, but when Naomi Watts' character starts trying to decipher the tape and figure out what it means, the events that follow just makes things even more bizarre.

I didn't see "The Ring" when it was in theaters, but I heard all the buzz about it. I watched the movie as soon as it came out on DVD and there were some very disturbing things going on in this movie. Everytime you think your getting closer to figuring out what the deal with the videotape is, something happens and some of it is truly unnerving (ie. the bath one of the characters takes at the end or the horse on the boat). Plus, just when I thought the movie was done and everything had been resolved, I looked at the counter on my DVD player and realized that there's still another fifteen minutes of movie left. What happens at the end still blows my mind!

Oh, and just a warning, if you're one of those people who like to go hunting around for easter eggs on DVDs, you may want to save the hunt for another disc. If you find the egg on this movie, you'll get to see the entire video without the ability to stop, fast forward, or pause it. Very freaky!

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Next Page