Midweek DVD - Ring
Filed under: Japan, Midweek Movie, Other — Malcolm Owen @ 9:09 am
Urban legends are wonderful. Everyone knows of a friend of a friend’s mother’s brother’s pen friend’s girlfriend that got killed in some freakish, crazy or paranormal way. Most of these stories are just that, stories, but there’s always a niggling feeling at the back of your mind that it could happen to you, no matter how farfetched the tale is.Ring (”Ringu”) revolves around one such urban legend, which turns out to be true. One week after watching a mysterious video, the viewers die in a repulsive contortion, as if they’ve been scared to death by something.
The sudden appearance of the urban legend piques the interest of Reiko, a reporter, whom after watching the video must find some way not to die, nor to let other people close to her get killed after they watch the tape too.
The whole concept of a haunted video cassette is a good one. As Ring was released just as DVDs were getting popular, people had an abundance of blank, unlabelled tapes in their house, and it really could happen to them, despite the entire story being completely untrue. Indeed, the film scared me 6 months after first watching it, after seeing a story about the American remake on a film review show on TV. The memory of the film disturbed me enough that I didn’t feel frightened on viewing, but half a year later. That does have to count for something.
Of course, if you don’t want to watch the original version of the film (in Japanese, with English subtitles), you could always get the remake (which isn’t even close to the first version’s greatness), but if you can stomach the better version of the two (The Japanese one), there’s a sequel…
