All The Ring Movies: Part One

Best thing: I suppose the way the video teases the victims is quite fun. Now continue watching for the remedy for the curse... oh no, it's been taped over!

Worst thing: While I was initially quite pleased to see the quirky spiritualist mortician who sees the whole killer videotape problem as a game. But when he keeps jumping conveniently to ridiculous conclusions and berating the lead female character for not doing the same, this became incredibly irritating. "Black blobs on the video? Oh that must be because it's projected from the mind of a psychic who's blinking." Blinking? Blinking inside their mind? Their eyelids are getting in the way of a mental image? Oh what a unique brand of logic you display!

I was keen to rewatch the Ring movies in preparation for the upcoming Sadako Vs Kakayo film (otherwise known as The Ring Vs The Grudge). So I figured I'd go further and try to check out the entire series.

Since the Korean version does not appear to have any sequels I decided to try out this version of Ring known as "The Ring Virus" first. I was interested to see the Korean take on this material.

Much of the film is pretty similar to the original except for a few chracters having a bit of a shift. The mother is admittedly giving a compelling central performance and the mortician who did the autopsy of the first victims gets to be a consistent character. However, bizarrely, this mortician is now a bit of a pervert and a naysayer.

Also, instead of her ex-husband, this time our protagonist is aided by a spiritualist mortician dismissed from the case who seems strangely unconcerned about the video curse even after watching the central cursed tape. (He's unsympathetic enough that, if they'd gone on to adapt the second book, it would have made more sense than the Japanese version of "Spiral" did.)

These quirky characters are an interesting change (at least initially). The protagonist also has a daughter instead of a son, but that doesn't really make any difference.

The problem with The Ring Virus is that it is made in such a dull and televisual way. Sure, the music is pretty cool, but the movie is not edited well enough to excite the audience. All the plot points of Ring are here but they come across as flat or even silly. The mystery doesn't work all that well because the spiritualist mortician makes such wild leap of logic that I just felt I needed to blindly accept what he said. And there's not really any attempt to make the scenario creepy.

The Ring Virus doesn't deserve recognition in this series. Our spiritualist mortician is still not the psychopathic rapist from the book and the protagonist is the same single mother from the Japanese movie rather than the man with a wife and child. So this film isn't even a close enough adaptation of the book to gain legitimacy that way. This is simply a far inferior version of the film which kick-started the Asian horror boom.

D-

Best thing: While the third act is wonderful I hadn't noticed before how wonderfully the sound effects contribute to the atmosphere. The director takes full advantage of the creepy sounds and images in distorted film.

Worst thing: The pacing is a bit slow. While the parts involving the videotape are intense and gripping, I did nor feel the same way about the rest. The mystery is intriguing but so much of it is based in the supernatural that the audience basically has to wait to be fed the answers. I like the characters but they aren't larger-than-life characters to reel you in to the story.

This is only my second time watching Ringu. When I first saw this I mostly had it on in the background. Yet as the story progressed it couldn't help but pull me in and I was thankfully entirely ignorant as to what the final act would involve. (As someone who hates typical ghost stories I was happy to see the "save the ghost" trend shockingly subverted.)

While there are some very cool atmospheric effects produced by making use if the distortions of the audio and visuals possible on film, this film also features an intriguing mystery. The feeling that the investigation could be counting down to our protagonist's death does much to stir up the interest of the audience.

A scene which I think works especially well is where the central character finally watches the cursed videotape. It's the first chance for the audience to see the full content of the tape and it's like we are watching the tape with her. When the content of the video ends there's a feeling of "that's it?" but in a seriously creepy way. The character instantly regrets deciding to watch the tape and is horrified that a short sequence of creepy images could be a death sentence.

Ring is a classic piece of horror cinema and rewatching this film it was even better than I remembered.

A+

Best thing: There are a number of dream-like sequences, but the stand-out for me is when Ryûji Takayama gets up from the autopsy table when his chest has been entirely removed. That was a striking image.

Worst thing: While there are a whole series of issues with this film, it goes completely off the rails with its big third act reveals. Someone can contract a form of smallpox by reading a journal? Sadako is projecting her DNA? Sadako can be reborn as a full grown magic clone seemingly overnight (in the book, apparently it's a week)? But if those weren't ridiculous enough, the claim that the ex-husband from the first movie was in league with Sadako is particularly stupid.

This is such a slow and dreary film and while there are a few points which almost promise a horror movie there's just none of the atmosphere of Ring.

Rasen (English title: Spiral) was released practically simultaneously with Ring. It has the same actors as the first movie, as well as some of the same sets/locations. But in following the plot of the second book, it kills off the two survivors from the first movie in a car crash off screen.

Sadako is still evil, bit instead of the iconic image of her face obscured by her hair, her face is now shown. The attempt to give us a creepy sex scene comes off more weird than scary. Rasen does a better job of being creepy towards the beginning but it would appear that the story is more of a bizarre sci-fi story than a horror story and the director doesn't seem entirely clear what to do with the material.

To be fair, the material is utterly nuts and yet the storytellers expect us to take it all seriously. The bizarre explanation of how characters are reborn is posed as scientific, yet I was left wondering why our characters didn't need some kind of futuristic super-lab to achieve the results. (We see cells injected in a petri dish, so it’s not just magic, even though it feels like it must be.)

This is like a different universe than Ring and if there's a way to make this material palatable, this director certainly had no clue.

E

Best thing: I absolutely love the way they bring back a character we previously heard had been put in a psychiatric care facility. The 'water test' they do with her has always seemed very cool to me. But while that was probably my favourite aspect the first time around, this time the vision of Sadako climbing spider-like up the walls of the well wearing the clay facial reconstruction was the one I now found most striking.

Worst thing: The journalist from the mother's office seems like a central character initially yet mainly becomes a sub-plot later on. Not starting with the same characters as we finished with last time, yet not consistently following the characters we begin with instead, makes the story feel a little muddled.

Having mostly had Ring on in the background the first time I watched it, my first reaction to Ring 2 all those years ago was to prefer it to the original. Ring 2 has some cool imagery and is a more visually compelling film, to my mind.

This time around, I give the first film more credit for its simplicity. However, having now seen Rasen, I  have to give the filmmakers credit for the new direction in which they take that material in the sequel. Nothing in the first film had really suggested that the ex-husband's student was a psychic. That they were sleeping together was pretty clear, but in the first movie Sadako, Sadako's mother and the ex-husband were the only psychics. But this sequel embraces that briefly-seen girlfriend’s psychic powers and her connection with the ex-husband, forming a much fuller and more compelling character for her than she was ever allowed in Rasen. I like how the imagery also uses her connection with the ex-husband to bring him back into the story rather than introducing a previously unseen friend of his from medical school.

In fact Ring 2 successfully brings together all the loose threads. Last time we heard about a witness to a Sadako death who went crazy, so this time we visit her in a psychiatric unit. Last time we met a grumpy man from the island where Sadako grew up, convinced that she was still planning to kill him. This time around he sees her recovered body, as pretty much the only family she has left, and he's still coming to terms with the sense that Sadako must still seek revenge on him.

We do get an old friend of the ex-husband from medical school. A maniacal psychological researcher hoping to capture psychic energy. He's not exactly a bad person, but there's hubris involved in his experiments with Sadako's evil psychic energy.

I don't think I normally have a huge amount of patience of weird Japanese stuff, yet I thought this story was pretty straightforward and not the bizarre mess some seemed to suggest. I still think Ring 2 holds up and it definitely continues the high quality of the first film.

A+

Best thing: Towards the end, this features some of the creepiest and coolest Sadako shambling effects out of any of the Ring movies. There's a reason why Sadako is shown contorting more than ever and it's especially far-fetched, even for an evil psychic/evil videotape movie, but the effect/performance in that scene is awesome.

Worst thing: For much of the film, minimal background musical cues are used. This remains the case until a climactic moment over half way through where the story goes full-Carrie. The lack of music makes the story feel rather slower and drier.

So, in between psychically murdering a journalist and being trapped in a well, Sadako decided to join a troupe of actors? Seems a little far-fetched, but okay.

There's a bit of a Carrie-esque element  here, but there are pacing issues all the way through. The story feels slow and awkward in the first half and a bit jumbled in the final act. Also, if one of your characters kills someone in self-defence and feels like they should confess, waiting til tomorrow to call the police might seem more than a little foolhardy.

There are parts of this film I liked and it had the potential to be a really solid entry in the series, but there's something really off about both the storytelling and the filmmaking.

C-