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Synopsis: Two girls are telling each other scary stories one night, when one girl relates a story about a "videotape that kills you seven days after you see it." The other girl blanches. She's actually seen this tape. The night marks the seventh day. Later that evening, something kills her. Reporter and single mother Rachel Keller is the girl's aunt. She is approached at her funeral to "look into" her neice's death. Later at the funeral, she hears about the videotape. Meanwhile, her son is having problems dealing with his cousin's death. He has been making disturbing drawings about it and having bad dreams. Strangely, his troubles began the week before her death. Rachel soon tracks the tape to a remote rural motel, where she watches it. The tape contains a series of seemingly disconnected images, including a ring of light that looks like an eclipse of the sun, several drowned horses, and a woman who commits suicide by jumping off a cliff. As the tape ends and the television jumps to static, the telephone rings. "Seven days," the voice on the phone tells her. Seriously freaked out, she takes a copy of the tape to an ex-boyfriend who happens to be a videographer, and from there begins to unravel the mystery. Her own deadline is forgotten, once her unsupervised son watches the tape and faces a seven day countdown of his own. She tracks the origins of the imagery on the tape to an island off the coast of upstate Washington, where there has been a plague affecting horses and where dark deeds lurk in the past...

Remake, Remodel: It is the nature of the horror genre that when one epochal horror movie comes along, it revitalizes the whole of the genre. Such a film is Hideo Nakata’s 1998 tale of videodromic fear and loathing, Ringu (The Ring). In addition to the various sequels and ripoffs (of which there are plenty, some commanding interest in and of themselves), the influence of this particular film can be seen in such diverse locales as Guillermo de Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath, Sam Raimi’s The Gift, and, in it’s own country, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo (aka: Pulse) and even Takashi Miike’s Audition (which "borrows" the image of Nakata’s ghost girl for the shots of Asami sitting alone in her room). The film has created an international boom time in horror fiilmmaking that makes the current era one of the truly exciting periods to be following the genre. And yet, in spite of all this, Nakata’s film has hardly been seen in the United States at all, thanks in large part to the deal struck by the makers of Ringu with the American studio, Dreamworks, which bought the remake rights. In this country, the original film is more rumored than experienced, passed around on bootleg videos and imported VCDs among the cognoscenti like the videotape that drives the film’s plot. It is my sincere hope that a successful American remake will bring the film to these shores in a good DVD edition that has subtitles that don't seem to be translated by someone deciphering English from a textbook (in much the same way as Alejandro Amenabar’s Open Your Eyes was released concurrently with its American remake, Vanilla Sky). My suspicion, though, is that Dreamworks will suppress the original in much the same way that MGM suppressed Gaslight all those years ago....

For now, the American mass audience will have to settle for the remake. And I DO mean "settle." While the remake is not in the same league as botched remakes of foreign successes like the remakes of, say, Spoorloos (The Vanishing), Diabolique, or Rashomon, Gore Verbinski’s version of The Ring is something of a disappointment. It starts on the wrong foot with a prelude that is filmed like a Scream-style dead teenager film, presumably so that the rest of the film can ambush the audience’s expectations, but this sequence is just plain silly, introducing logical failings that the film never really deals with (these are by no means the ONLY logical failings in the film, and to be fair, some of the plot logic--or lack thereof--actually originates in the original film). After this sequence, the film settles in on its real protagonist: Naomi Watts and her creepy, psychic son. Naomi Watts is excellent here, in her first starring role since David Lynch plucked her from obscurity in Mullholland Dr. and director Verbinski has drenched the film in a mood of Pacific Northwestern melancholy that ratchets up the feeling of impending doom. And then things start to go awry.

Because of its structure, Verbinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger can’t resist the urge to explain too damned much. Much of the explanatory material is derived from the original film’s sequels (which, by and large, make the same mistake of explaining away the mystery), and the current film simply sags under the weight of it all. This is a fault compounded by Verbinski's insistence on leading the audience around by the nose. Everytime Rachel discovers another piece of the puzzle, Verbinski includes a flashback to the videotape, followed invariably by a shot of Naomi Watts giving an "Oh, I get it" expression. Audiences obviously can't be trusted to piece this together themselves. One can also spot the filmmakers pacing the audience, as if the are required to provide X-number of scares per half-hour, which results in a number of unnecessary "springloaded cat" moments. The original film--a considerably shorter film--was filmed in a flat, Ozu-like deadpan that let the story and mood carry the day. It was a considerably more elegant film.

But it’s not a total loss. The film retains the central image from the original, embellishing it somewhat with Hollywood gloss, thanks to make-up man Rick Baker and a bunch of guys with computers. This central image still sends a chill down the spine, even at second hand. And if one is in a large audience that is completely unfamiliar with the original, as I was when I saw this film, there is a tremendous amount of pleasure to be had from the communal experience of watching a horror movie that knows its business. Audiences are so jaded now on mindless scenes of gore that an old-fashioned fright film that uses its pacing, cinematography, and an over-arching feeling of dread will work them over but good. And if the final result doesn’t have the paranoia and apocalyptic intimations of the original, well, that’s our loss, now isn’t it?