Horses in Place of Volcano-A different look at a horror masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (4 August 2003)

Now that I've seen the original Japanese version of THE RING, I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two films. Both films are not that faithful to the novel, I understand (Can't verify it until an English translation comes out), but the US version is generally a mirror of RINGU. Except that the female protagonist in the US version is a much stronger character than her Japanese counterpart. That is because of the difference in our cultures.
Another difference is that we seemed to replace the volcano from the original with the strange death of one woman's horses. The horse-owner replaces the psychic, placing more of the power in the daughter (It's also interesting that it is the mother in the US version who throws the daughter into the well, while it was the father in the Japanese version). Verbinski (or the script writer) was wise to set it in the Seattle area, so to echo the original's obsession with water. One last observation, The scene at the hospital was taken from RINGU 2.