Ring a Ding Ding

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2009)

***SPOILERS*** At first I thought that "The Ring" was the telephone ringing right after one watched this crazy video tape about trees deep water wells a fly in the ointment and finally a desolate island with this strange looking woman and lighthouse with only a ladder and chair in it! All taped in grainy black and white. It came as a complete shock to me when it was reviled in the movie that anyone who watched this mind bogging tape would die in exactly seven days! I thought that anyone who was able to sit through the whole God awful video tape would have died a whole lot sooner!
It's after her niece Katie, Amber Tamlyn, suddenly died of fright seven days after she saw the tape that Seattle newspaper investigative reporter Rachel Keller, Naomi Watts, decided to check what was the cause of Katie's mysterious death. As things turn out not only does Rachel track down the strange killer tape, at the country motel where Katie spent the weekend with her friends, but also ends up watching it! What made things even worse is that Rachel's six year old son Adian, David Drofman, saw the tape as well without his mother knowing about it. This set the stage for Rachel, after finding out that the tape can actually kill anyone who watched it, together with her live-in boyfriend and Aidan's father Noah, Martin Henderson, attempt to somehow find out how to prevent the tape from not only killing Aidan but also Rachel as well as Noah who, you guessed it, also saw the tape!
The movie "The Ring" never fully explains why this weirdo video-tape has this strange power to kill anyone who takes the time to watch it! We get this half-ass story that it had something to do with the creepy Morgan family who were champion horse breeders and lived on the island depicted in the video-tape. Anna Morgan, Shannon Cochran, the strange woman in the tape is shown killing herself by jumping off a cliff on the island. Anna's even stranger daughter Samara, Daveigh Chase, the person who the video-tape seemed to be all about seems to have had completely vanished into thin air after the tape was finished. It's old man Richrd Morgan, Brian Cox, the only surviving member of the Morgan clan who seems to be the only person in the movie who knows the secret of what this off-the-wall tape is really all about. But with him being tracked down and unmercifully harassed by Rachel into having him reveal the tape's secrets he just flips out and and ended it all in grand fashion. Richard goes out in a blaze of glory by electrocuting himself with some 20,000 volts of electricity using his overflowing bathtub as the electric volts powerful grounded conductor!
***SPOILER**** The movie starts to fall apart as it slowly, and I mean Slowly, lumbers on to it's shocking as well as brainless conclusion. It's then that everything goes to pieces when the long dead, it turned out that she was murdered, Samara comes back to life in both the bottom of a 150 foot empty well as well as in, and out, of Noah's TV set! By the time the film is finally over you begin to realize that not only you but those who made it have absolutely no idea what its supposed to be all about!
P.S "The Ring" seems to have copied, even though its based on the recent Japanese horror thriller "Riongu", from the 1983 David Cronenberg Sci-Fi classic "Videodrome". The big difference between the two movies is that "Videodrome" despite it's complicated storyline was both thought-provoking as well as entertaining where as "The Ring" never even managed to get off the ground!