94 - The Ring

    Watching a cursed video leads to a phone call warning that the viewer will die in 7 days.  A journalist, her estranged boyfriend, and her son all investigate the origin of this curse in a race to save themselves before the 7 days are up.

    That summary made it sound much more silly than it is.
    When I first saw The Ring in theaters, I don't remember how much I knew about the premise.  I know that I saw it in a fairly crowded theater with Cathy, and it was really scary.  While I was a bit creeped out when I saw The Haunting the first time, this really stayed with me.  It was hard to get to sleep that night, and for most of the next week.

    Nearly ever horror movie starts with a kill to set up what it is that we should be scared of.  This sequence has such a massive amount of tension that it easily sets up the horror for the rest of the movie.
    The direction is fantastic.  The angles are chosen carefully, the focus is shifted perfectly, and we get these tiny things to make us jump just a little.  We can see a slight reflection of the room while we're in the kitchen.  When the TV turns on in the next room, we can see that light in the reflection.  It's a tiny change, but it's very effective.
    Not just the small things, but the large things are handled really well.  Once the opening sequence reaches a climax, the movie gets going on the core plot.  We're still curious about exactly what happened at the end of that opening.  We get a few hints, and then when we least expect it, we get a flashback shot that shows what happened.  This sort of sucker-punch keeps us terrified.

    There are a lot of things I really like about this movie, but I have some complaints, but they are common to most Japanese horror.  How much a story makes sense is less important than the effects it has.  As a result, there are many Japanese horror movies I've seen that have some really effective scares, but the story is mostly nonsensical.  This, being the American version, is much more straightforward, but we still have a strange reliance on symbols.  Things that appear in the video also appear in the 'real world,' but the meaning of those things seems to rely too heavily on just being creepy, rather than being a more functional part of the story.

    This was my first time watching this on Blu-ray, and it's great.  The tint of the movie leans heavily toward a greenish and bluish look, and some of the colors have been washed out.
    There's another thing that's bugging me about the movie.  Most of it distinctly takes place near Seattle, WA.  But there are a few things that imply it's taking place near the Boston area.  Characters refer to other students going to Revere.  And a news report talks about a student being from the Back Bay area.  I considered that these might also have locations near Seattle.  And they don't.  At least not that I can find by Google maps.