31 Days of Scary Movies: The Ring

For the month of October, I will be posting reviews of scary movies. The opinions in these reviews, unless otherwise noted, are all mine.

This review is another guest post from my brother, David. And he knows the prank at the end is funny because he’s done it before. Guess who he played it on.

The Ring

“Seven Days” should be a pretty recognizable quote for everyone by now.  The Ring, based off Japanese film “Ringu” tells the tale of a movie that kills people a week after they watch it.  Well for an overly simplistic plotline, it’s basically saying “bloody mary” in the mirror, and instead of a ghost killing you right away, you get to wait for seven days.  For a longer plotline, well….

Okay, so there’s an urban legend that there is this movie where if you watch it, someone will tell call you right after it ends and say “Seven Days”, and you die a week later.  These two school girls watch it, and sure enough, one of them dies with a look of pure terror on her face.  Her aunt Rachel, played by Naomi Watts, goes investigative journalist and starts investigating the rumors and the death.  She decides to watch the film far away from her creepy son Aiden, so she goes to a cabin in the middle of nowhere that dead-girl watched it at originally.  She gets the fated phone call, so naturally the next day feels a need to show the film to her sons father, because hey, if you get cursed you might as well curse your ex while you are at it.  So she gets nightmares, and nosebleeds, and discovers that putting evil little girls in a mental institute will make a magic video tape that kills people.

For a PG-13 movie, this film was pretty scary.  It didn’t rely on too many jump scares, the killer film was pretty disturbing, and many lines wind up staying scary after the credits role.  Of course the idea that what is on the TV can actually reach out and affect you makes for a great sense of tension when you are actually watching the TV right then and there.  A whole lot of the movie doesn’t make sense, including the motivation for the ending, why Aiden calls his mother by her first name, or how this movie created a separate genre of scary movies.  But an American version of a Japanese movie is bound to be a little confusing.

From a personal level, I was not scared by this movie.  It was too formulaic for me.  I enjoyed it however, because it followed the formula so well.  I enjoy having people watch this one because they fall for the scares.  It seems more like a How-To movie than an actual scary movie.  As a great prank though, have your cell phone out and ready to call the number of whoever is watching it for when the credits start to roll.  I promise they will stare distrustfully at the phone while it rings and refuse to answer.