Ok, so I tried to watch The Ring (American Version) the other night. Due to several interruptions I only managed to see bits and pieces of the beginning then I saw the last 45 minutes. What I did manage to see was a royal dissapointment. What the hell? I didn’t get it. The movie made no sense. The horse on the ferry? Whaaaaaat? The ending? The little girl…WTF?
Spoil it. Spoil it unmercilessly. I don’t want to have to sit through that tripe again but I am curious as to what it was I wasted my precious time on.
Thanks all.
Ok, you asked for it (with smiles)
Best I can figure, there was this disturbed little girl who lived on a lighhouse/horse ranch. :mad: I can’t remember all the details but apparently her mom tried to kill her by tossing her down a well. I guess it took seven days for her to die in the well. :o
Anyhow, after she died, I guess she produced some low-budget Nine Inch Nails style video that basically contained a bunch of clues and whatnot. 
Watching the video, as you know, will trigger a phone call from beyond the grave informing you that you will die in seven days. :eek: The method of death is not quite clear as it seems to involve the scary little girl coming out of the TV set. I guess the people just die of fright but how scary is a little girl really?
Anyhow, Hot Mom goes on her investigation and learns all this crap and figures that the girl just wants her remains found and burried correctly (instead of just being left at the bottom of the well). 
Anyhow, the bury the remains and everyone thinks it’s over but it’s not. All that did was free the girl to wreak more havoc (including killing Boyfriend Guy who watched the tape). :mad:
Hot Mom can’t figure out why she has been spared until she sees the copy tossed under the sofa. She realizes that the only way for her son to escape the curse is to make a copy and give it to someone else and with much reluctance, she does.
The End
If I had to sit through that whole crap-fest twice, so do you. 
What I can’t figure is why it’s supposedly so scary?
To add to msmith’s post:
[spoiler]The little girl had some psychic power where she could place images into other people’s minds. She didn’t really have control over it though. Apparently it also worked on horses, because the horses all killed themselves around her. Her mom couldn’t take it anymore and threw her in the well to kill her and stop her from putting images into her head. Must have still been some residual energy or something that made the horse on the ferry flip out (it’s a movie, that’s a plausible explanation) or the horse heard the legend of the little girl from the other horses. It also fits with the contents of the tape, which is like a bunch of random thoughts from the girl, maybe as she died.
The girl didn’t want her remains found, she just wanted her story told and passed on to others. The hot mom was on the wrong track when she thought finding the remains and burying them was the end of it. So copying the tape is what the girl really wanted, as then more people could know her story (it didn’t seem as though someone needed to watch the copy, just that the copy be made). Finding the remains didn’t change anything. Hot mom survived because she had made the copy earlier in the movie. She figured it out in time to save her son though.
Also, not everyone died from fright. The girl at the beginning did, because it was scary to see that little bitch crawl out of the TV (especially in a lonely hotel room by yourself with the lights off, like when I watched it). But I’m pretty sure she killed the hot mom’s boyfriend in another manner, because there was plenty of blood as I remember it.
The one thing I don’t get though, is why hot mom continued to have problems (like the bloody nose) after having made the copy.[/spoiler]
On preview, why are we using spoiler boxes when the title basically says there’ll be spoilers inside?
I’m pretty sure someone did need to watch it. Either Aiden or Noah watched the copy that Naomi Watts made (I’m pretty sure Aiden watched it, and it was under the couch since Naomi Watts threw it there). And I’m pretty sure one of the last lines of the movie is Aiden asking his mom what happens to whoever they show the copy to.
Also, I don’t think anyone died of fright. Fright doesn’t make your face turn gross to the extent that Naomi Watts’s niece (and Noah’s) did.
So you see bits and pieces of a movie and you’re surprised you didn’t understand what was going on? And we wonder why Hollywood dumbs down their plots…
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the faces (I covered my eyes in preparation the second and third time I saw it), but I figured that their faces mimicked how a face would look if the person drowned and then was preserved in water for however many (15? 20?) years. Somehow Samara made them die the way she died. Or something like that. YMMV.
I thought something similar. On the other hand, I also remember Namoi Watt’s sister saying something like “the doctors said her heart just stopped”, so who knows.
Same here, frankly I was waiting for Mulder & Scully to show up & solve the mystery. It felt like an extra-long episode of the X-Files.
Her power was that she could create photographic images with her mind.
google Ted Serios for the story of a drunken idiot that made the same claim.
In the Japanese version, they just died of fright (the faces weren’t moldy, just screaming). In the American version, it’s never directly stated, but it seemed that the victims experience the seven days of Samara’s dying inside the well in a single moment, and thus end up looking like she did.
And personally, I enjoyed both versions of the movie. Still do.
Here is an excellent guide to all things “the Ring.” :eek:
Another movie which suffered from the fatal “one pointless point twist too many” trend.
This horrid development has been pushed by the previous success of M. Night Shamalamdingdong. However, the Movie Gods could take no more of the poser, and inflicted the fake Sci-Fi documentary scandle and the horrible reviews and box office number of “The Village” on him to ensure that he would be punished.
The movie as a plot twist delivery system trend is annoying as all get out. Indentity was another promising movie ruined this way.
Another bad example of this trend was the end of the remake of the Planet of the Apes- whose ending was a completely illogical plot twist simply for the sake of a plot twist. Its one of those movies where you look at the screen and realize that it makes your head hurt- but not in a good way.
:mad:
As I recall, the plot twist was present in the Japanese original, and therefore was carried over to the American remake. “the Ring” is actually a trilogy of Japanese horror novels that formed the basis of the original movie series (*Ringu, Ringu 2, * and *Ring 0:Birthday) which elaborates on the Samara (Sadako in the original) curse.
You know what really bugged me about this film. Aside from not being very scary and that hot mom didn’t get naked, the really stupid thing is the title.
Oh yes, The Ring. When you see The Ring…
When they explain the image of The Ring and where it comes from, the filmmakers decide to ignore gravity. You see, incase you missed this bit, The Ring comes into view as the round stone is pushed over the well. You are down in the well and the stone is blocking out the light. Now when we see the actual well with the stone covering it the circumference of the stone is much larger than that of the well. But for the dramatic covering up shot, when Naomi Campbell is finally, at least wet, we see an image not unlike a solar eclipse. Well the only way you would see that is if the covering stone was smaller than the well and if it were smaller than the well it would drop down the well like, well, a stone.
I’m confused. Koji Suzuki wrote The Ring, and just released the second book in the trilogy, spiral, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. But they’ve made movies of books that don’t exist yet.
I haven’t seen either of the movie version, but have been struck by comments here how different the book and movies seem to be. For example, protagonist of the book is a guy, not some mom. And the explanation for why people die seems much better in the book. And the Ring, at least in the book, I believe refers to the chain letter effect of the curse, kind of a web ring type of thing.
I have nothing to add other than:
Naomi Watts is uberhot. She is one of the sexiest MILFs I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, it was.
[spoiler]In fact, in the Japanese version, I’m pretty sure we’re left with the impression that the kid and his mom are going to give the movie to his grandfather, who we’d seen earlier in the film.
The Japanese movie also has a bunch of garbage about people being psychic that totally ruined it for me.[/spoiler]