Not a patch on the Japanese version

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2008)

I might have liked this film more if I hadn't seen the Japanese version first. I found the digressions from the original plot in this version irritating in the extreme. The business about the horses is spooky, but not really anything to do with the main plot. The same goes for the stuff about the barn. The director appears to have thrown in stuff from Ringu 2, without any regard for whether it belongs in this film or not.
Then there was the child actor who played Aiden. His performance wasn't as convincing as that of Takashi Yamamura as Yoichi in the original, and I really couldn't bring myself to care too much what happened to him, which killed the suspense.
SPOILER WARNING
I also found it puzzling how after Richard electrocutes himself in the bathtub (in a shocking, but gratuitous scene) Noah suddenly arrives virtually out of nowhere, then they seem to make it back to the cabin on the mainland in an unreasonably short length of time.
Rachel's choice of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a tape to replace with the cursed video seems pointlessly nasty. Why put it in a children's video, and not, say, an 'adult' film which a child would be unlikely to see? Is it okay for children to be cursed to die as long as they're not HER children?