Ringu [dir. Hideo Nakata]

1998, 96 minuts
w/ Nanako Matsushima & Miki Nakatani
[Unfortunately I'd seen Gore Verbinski's The Ring before seeing this so its pretty much impossible to give a completely objective reaction to the film as the plots were nearly the same. Any whoo, Ringu comes off much slighter than its remake, focusing on setup and atmosphere rather than scares and this has mixed results. While Nakata creates a lonely Japan with dark, crowded corridors and rooms, the film seems to forget to push its storyline of the well known video tape that causes death in seven days. Hiroshi Takahashi adapts succesfully creepy techniques from the novel, especially the distorted faces on photographs, but forgets to give us much reason to care about our characters and fails to elaborate on the reasoning for the tapes' creators motivation. Ringu is often paired with The Blair Witch Project as rejuvenating the horror genre but the latter is so much more impressive in execution while Ringu is all concept and only clumsily translates to screen. A rewatch of Verbinski's may confirm my thoughts that his is actually the better of the two.]

**1/2