I went and saw “The Ring” the other night at my local neighborhood theatre gay-flophouse-cum-Hollywood-cineplex “The Stella” the other night. The theater is great for watching horror movies: the majority of the seats appear as if someone has set fire to their frames; the stench of months-old rotten food floats around the theater like smelly, decomposed ghosts; various neighborhood bums are always sitting around hacking phlegm onto the floor and openly drinking booze while muttering to themselves; rats scurry the floors and brush your ankles, and it is heated by a sole chthonic space heater that habitually spits sparks in every direction. I was a big fan of the Japanese “Ring”, so I was interested in seeing how the remake turned out.
Its pretty good, but it makes you realize why America doesn’t seem to be able to make decent horror movies anymore. The main problem actually is that this version made a lot more sense than Ringu did, and not really to its credit. While too much incoherency can really hurt a film, horror movies are really one of the few kinds of cinema where loose ends actually deepen a story’s emotional resonance. It’s probably because most of us don’t generally have anything really scary happen to them, so our only experience with it are in dazed, plotless nightmares, which in and of themselves are just a morbid, hallucinating subconscious interpreting random electrical patterns shooting through our brains.
Ringu was a movie that was very well plotted, but there were a lot of “loose ends” that really added to its brooding nightmarishness. A good example is Sedako’s completely random ability to create a video tape capable of murdering people. In Ringu, she was murdered fifty years previously and was simply a benign psychic entity. In this version, “Samarra” (a really awful choice for an American style name, bringing to mind diaphonous silks, Arabian spices and Thousand and One Nights style wonders; as compared to “Sedako”, which has a terrible insectoid quality to its syllables. By the way, Samarra is a city in Iraq - how long before some hippy lunatic sums up the entire film as yet another pro-war piece churned out by Bush and his Hollywood propoganda machine?) can make photographic negatives appear out of thin air when she wants to murder people. This isn’t in Ringu.
This wouldn’t be all that bad a change except it just calls the viewer’s attention to the remaining loop holes: photographic negatives are different than video tape. Samarra has never even SEEN a video tape - how does she know what one is? And even if that can be explained, who dropped the mobile phone down Samarra’s well? What’s with the pictures? In this case, explaining part of it just removes you from the reality of the picture enough to make the other implausbilities goofily jarring.
There are similar changes for “clarity” that just end up making the film seem weaker and more juvenille. The week deadline in Ringu is totally arbitrary; in this version, it is exactly the amount of time Samarra remained alive in the well. Considering Ringu 2’s best scene is at the beginning, where the detectives examining Sedako’s corpse indicate she had been alive for an additional forty or fifty years, brooding, hating and directing her psychic murderousness outwards, this change makes things significantly less creepy or me.
And hey, what’s up with stressing the link between Samarra and the little boy by dressing up the little stone-faced twerp (another graduate of the Hayle Joel Osmond school of obnoxious twerp method acting) in a dress for the Samarra flashbacks? Transvestite children are icky and creepy in an entirely different way than an amphibious psychic ghost murdering people via videotape. What maniac decided a Culkin in a dress would be a more effective monster than this thing?
The first is Sadako in Ringu, the second, the American version.
Other bad choices with child Samarra: showing her face (in Ringu, it is always hidden behind a massive cascade of thorny black hair, leaving her identifiable only by her ghostly garb and monstrous shambling posture), having her talk and say stupid, meaningless things, and elaborating on her past just enough to make her murder in the well a laughable over-reaction on the part of small town rubes, as opposed to a mysterious, ill-defined mania that is only hinted at in the context of the insane, stream-of-consciousness of the video tape.
The finale of Ring has also been drastically cheapened. In Ringu, the little boy is saved from Sedako by making a copy of the tape and giving it to his grandfather to watch, giving Ayote a horrific sacrifice of murdering her own father to save her son’s life. In Ring, the kid makes a copy of the tape with no clue as to who it is going to be given to.
And speaking of the little boy, what the hell is up with his warning at the end of Ring? “You weren’t supposed to help her escape…” Hey, kid, leaving aside the fact that you could have told your mommy this sort of totally relevant shit before, exactly why not? How could it possibly get any worse? Also note that Samarra isn’t mixing up her murder sprees at all by the end of the film, making you wonder exactly what he’s so worried about.
Almost all of the changes in the film seem like bad ones, or unnecessary ones. The father’s revelation about his own “disappointing” relationship with his father is just Hollywood emotional self-indulgence at its irrelevant worst. The horses stuff is pretty effective, especially the gut-wrenching scene on the ferry, but also completely disposable to the film. Sedako’s video tape is no longer the psychic manifestation of her own deranged mind, but a fortune teller summary of exactly what creepy things the characters will see before the end of the movie. Even the last murder is lame: the choice of computer animation in the last scene makes being killed like Sedako seem like some sort of kick-ass computer animation spectacle out of Tron.
I’ll say that I liked it, but it is vastly inferior to the original. One plus about seeing this one is that it has Naomi Watts in it, who I hope someday will star in a lesbian porn movie called “Nicole on Nicole” where she makes out in a bubble bath with her doppelganger, Nicole Kidman.
If at all possible, see Ringu before you see this one.