Fairly suspenseful thriller with supernatural undertones.

Rating: Null/10 (1 September 2005)

I really had no intention of seeing "The Ring", but my public library is sending me "The Ring 2" next week, so I figured I'd better find out what the first movie was about. I wasn't expecting a lot, and got more than I was expecting. Even though it was late, and I was tired, I just couldn't quit watching. I believe everyone knows the basic premise -- people who watch a certain video die at 10PM exactly 7 days later.
Naomi Watts is the main protagonist, Rachel, a reporter who's niece dies without explanation. She gets very interested when a teacher shows her drawings made by her small son, days before the death of his cousin, showing her buried. (Watts, a Brit raised in Australia, is one of the few who can do a very credible American accent.)
SPOILERS: Amber Tamblyn, a year before her TV role as Joan of Arcadia, plays cousin Katie here, who tells her fiend that she and her boyfriend at a remote motel had watched a video, and it is she who dies of fright as she opens a door at home with a noisy TV screen where she experiences something deathly frightening. Rachel figures out quickly that Katie and her boyfriend both died at exactly 10PM. She discovers another young couple who had died mysteriously at 10PM. Close examination of the video tape, which she finds at the remote motel, reveals the image of a light house, which she traces to a San Juan island off the Seattle coast. Long story short, years earlier a little girl had been thrown into a well and covered, and now that well was immediately below the room Katie had seen the video in. The only way, apparently, to avoid death in 7 days was to somehow free the dead girl, which Rachel does. But that isn't the end of the story, setting up the sequel. Near the end, the dead girl crawls out of the TV in Rachel's divorced husband's place, and he, having also seen the video, dies in his chair.