Sorry but it sucks

Rating: 2/10 (10 May 2006)

This film is a waste of time.
That said, the first ten minutes are extraordinary. Nicely shot, creepy, beautifully paced, and well acted. The only other ray of hope for this film was the first time we see one of Samara's victims (the blonde in the closet! Holy crap! I sure didn't see THAT coming in the theater!), but other than that this film tries and fails to repeat the aura of the first ten minutes for an couple of hours. Most of it is just too ridiculous. The horse scene, the electrocution scene, the final TV scene - nothing works. It's just not good. The horse/ferry scene is uneccessary, really just a lame attempt to be disturbing. The electrocution scene is too drawn out and implausible (this is a movie about ghosts coming out of TVs - for a shot to not work in it because it's too fantastic is really something!).
This film almost works, or would have, if it ended after our heroine solved the mystery of the tape. "Wow," I said to myself in the theater as Naomi Watts and her beau walked off into the night, "They really tried some interesting stuff in that movie. Not all of it worked, but at least they tried." Then the film kept going. "Wait," I asked myself, "Why aren't they rolling credits?" Then it dawned on me that the movie was about to nosedive. I distinctly remember saying "No good can come of this." aloud, referring to the decision to not end the film. Obviously, I was horrendously disappointed. After seeing Creepy Little Hospitalized Girl Samara, Soggy Vicious Undead Samara was silly. The whole set-piece where Noah dies is totally predictable (right down to him tripping over something), Samara isn't scary, and removing frames of film to make movement jerky isn't frightening - it's headache inducing. God-awful ending to a god-awful movie.