We decided to catch a movie, and this night it was The Ring. The movie apparantly a remake of a Japanese movie, Ringu. And apparantly that movie also scared a lot of people.
Before I end up in a rant about movies like these, remakes or not,
there’s one kind of movie I can’t appreciate. You guessed it: I don’t
like horror movies. The generic American horror movie literally dumps
the viewer in a ‘pool of blood’ and ‘anger’. And in most of those
movies, it’s always women who die a bloody dead. Somewhere’s in
the late 80s, mid 90s, things apparantly changed, when directors
started to concentrate on different photographic effects to scare the
shit out of people. Call it the David Lynch or Twin Peaks
factor. Watching the movie ‘The Ring’ convinced me that
horror-movie directors have learned things from Twin Peaks.
Great photography in The Ring, that’s for sure. The video (as played
in the movie) reminds of great silent and absurd (surrealistic) movies.
And although absurd, yes, the images in that video get to people, one
way or another. The ladder that leads to something (‘Heaven is a barn,
and hell is a well’), the mirror and the man watching out of the
window. It could have been a Lynch movie.
There are flaws. Some clues seem to be missing (how and who?).
The effects (somewhere at the end) are neat, but not really impressing
(‘Let me guess, she steps out of the video’). And it is
too easy to swallow that some people don’t die ‘because of the
fact that they made a whatever of the movie’. And all those clues
to the number seven: we’ve seen that before too, didn’t we?
But on the overall, a good (and surprising) movie. And better than
‘Signs’, for sure. Don’t watch the movie on your own. And count. Seven
it is, OK?