A drab script,but phenom production and refreshing ending.

Rating: Null/10 (23 October 2002)

Just a quick warning, possible spoiler here. Just got out of this drenched flic last night, and I loved it. Yes, it had its faults. The scripting was a little ramshackle, but overall a very refreshing and genuinely creepy li'l pic. Production design was appropriately water-logged--everything from Morgan's death to the psychiatric hospital records room felt distinctly wet. Acting was descent at worst, with some genuinely good moments.
As far as the overall movie, very stylishly done. Verbinski and the DoP's subliminal-quick scattering of images from the Tape were very well executed, setting the viewer a bit more on edge. Daveigh Chase's performance as Samara was downright chilling. Very nice to see elements for the original "Ringu" in the film as well: spatterings of japanese imagery, and Samara's final emergence to kill Noah was straight out of Nakata's minor masterpiece.
As far as the ending, I didn't find it a false end in the least. The "first" ending was pretty much a carbon copy of every tripe-tossed modern ghost story--"the horribly wronged, murderous ghost does all it's horribly wrong murders just to get someone to solve the mystery of its horribly wrong death"....which is, overall, horribly wrong. It then turns that sucker on it's ear with one line from little Aidan: "You helped her?". Just a bit of a jab at all the feel-good happy endings infecting modern horror. It's a bit of a stretch to convince me that an already disturbed child left for dead )for a week before dying) at the bottom of a well by her mother would be satisfied by someone simply finding her body. An experience like that would leave anyone just a little bit damaged.