Saturday, October 09, 2004
RINGU
1998
Directed by Hideo Nakata
English Subtitles
Run Time 100 minutes
Before the horror of The RING, there was Ringu (1998). The 1998 Japanese version may not bring the huge box office appeal of it's American counterpart, but the simplistic storyline and suspense techniques seem to carry its own.
Those who have seen THE RING may wonder what the major differences are between the two movies. THE RING follows RINGU almost exactly to the T in general. However, there are some differences. All in all, I felt that THE RING, although more horrific and suspenseful than it's counterpart, was actually more confusing than RINGU and after watching the original Japanese version, I find it more confusing that Americans make things more confusing when they don't need to make the confused even more confused.
RINGU, is the story of an independent young woman, Reiko Asakawa(Nanako Matsushima) who struggles to balance the role of single mother and journalist. She is currently interviewing school children for the purpose of finding out what socio-psychological aspects lay behind urban legends. Ms. Asakawa's current subject of obsession: an urban legend of a mysterious and enigmatic video tape with a deadly curse. After watching the video tape, the telephone rings (with no one on the other end) and exactly seven days after viewing the puzzling video,the viewer dies horribly. The film does a great job of immediately setting the tone of giving children a voice and trying to find the keys behind their minds, their fantasies, their imagination and how little of it fits or is misunderstood by the adult world. This, of course, becomes an important part of the plot.
During a standard interview with one of the many elementary school children, Ms. Asakawa asks the child if she knows anyone who has died from this video tape curse. The young child gives her the names of two teenagers, found dead in their car of a sudden heart attack.
intrigued by the child's innocent but naked honesty, Ms. Asakawa researches the incident, only to find that her interviewee was not lying: an article in the newspaper confirms the little girl's urban legend was not a legend afterall.
Meanwhile, tragedy has struck Asakawa's own family. The sudden death of her teenage niece forces Asakawa to confront her niece's classmates at the funeral. Reluctantly, the teenage girls divulge that Asakawa's niece was one of 6 friends who spent the weekend together at a remote cabin a week earlier and they all had watched a strange video tape. Asakawa's research into the teens' death verify that all 6 of the teenage vacationers died mysterious, gruesome deaths at exactly the same hour: their hearts simply stopped beating an their were faces frozen in terror.
To get more answers, Asakawa visits the cabin where the teens vacationed, to find an unlabeled video tape in the hotel lobby. Exhausted but curious, Asakawa watches the tape, full of strange, bizarre images. A few seconds after the tape, the phone in the cabin rings...with no one on the other end.
Somewhere deep down inside, Asakawa is freaked THE FUCK OUT. She makes a copy of the video tape, goes home and enlists the help of her dead-beat but hot ex-husband, Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada)to help her with the mystery. He watches the video and thinks nothing of it, as HIS phone does not ring after he watches it.
THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET A LITTLE....FREAKY.
Unlike THE RING, the two main characters, Asakawa and Ryuji start to have ESP capability after watching the video tape. This special telepathic passageway is what makes skeptic Ryuji turn around and believe in the urban legend. To make things worse, their son gets a hold of the video tape and watches it 2 days after his parents. They are both driven more than ever to find the answer to the video tape riddle. The couple does some research and finds out that the woman in one of the images in the video is a famous clairvoyant who died mysteriously by throwing herself into an erupting volcano on a remote Japanese island decades before. Asakawa and Ryuji's ESP "flashbacks" draw them towards this remote island and there they find that their mystery woman had been the victim of a witchhunt. They also find out that she was the mistress of a married doctor and that she and the doctor had a daughter together. As Asakawa and Ryuji get closer to the core of the island, they start to understand that the mysterious daughter of the clairvoyant possessed the power to kill people with her mind alone. Those who she "wished" dead fell to the ground: their hearts had stopped suddenly and their faces were frozen in terror.
Both Asakawa and Ryuji share a vision: the young girl was struck over the head by her father, the doctor, and pushed down a well. Later, the doctor covered up the well and his mistress jumped into the volcano in anguish. The doctor and island people, fearing the powers of the young girl's mind, pressured her father to commit the heinous act of doing away with his own flesh and blood. When Asakawa and Ryuji find out that the well lay beneath the cabin getaway where Asakawa's niece watched the video tape with her friends, they rush back to the location to "free" the body of the murdered spooky daughter at the bottom of the well, hoping to lift the curse forever.
Surely they have solved the mystery of the video tape...and saved themselves.
All seems right when they finally do find the remains of the murdered little girl and Asakawa, the first out of the three to watch the video tape, outlives the curse. Ryuji and Asakawa return to their separate homes, certain that Ryuji and their son are now free from the curse of the Well Girl.
...of course, it's not true!! For as soon as Ryuji comes upon his hour of doom (the seventh day on the hour of watching the video tape), his TV turns on by itself and the horrible continuation of the video tape plays...as we sit there watching a super duper creepy girl crawl out of the well and , through the tv screen and onto his apartment floor, killing Ryuji in the same manor as all of her other victims.
Upon hearing this, Asakawa has to be shitting in her pants, because she cannot figure out why she lived but Ryuji did not...and worse off, she has less than one day to figure out the riddle before her young son dies, too.
This review is long enough, plus I've given most of it away, don't you think? I'm not going to give you the answer to the riddle....Now get off your fat asses and go watch a scary movie....
