around the collar

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2002)

The Ring plays out like a movie written by a computer that was fed the plots of the top-grossing horror movies of the last 5 years and from those details randomly generated a "story": the boy who communicates with dead people from The Sixth Sense; the videotape from The Blair Witch Project; the dying teens and prying reporter of Scream; the murderous mother of The Others: stick it all in a blender, run on high for 60 seconds, and the mush left at the bottom is The Ring.
This is a film that, when done, simply doesn't make any sense. Some movies leave you scratching your head, but The Ring only leaves you scratching your derriere. This is such an helter-skelter exercise in everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink screenwriting that you've quit trying to make sense of things long before the credits roll. I'm tempted to call the writing adolescent, but that's a disservice to the adolescents in the audience whom I saw the film with: they were snickering at this ludicrous movie long before the adults caught on to what a stinker we were in for.
Somebody poured a lot of money into this silly mess, though, and it shows on the screen. The film is crafted with the care of overwrought appetizers served at an uptown art opening. Every beam of light is in place, and the camera adopts stylish angles, almost none of which are relevant to the storytelling, but which fill the viewer with the same vulgar pleasure as watching a well-made beer commercial.
It isn't all bad, though. The dripping, creepy images -- centipedes, drowned children, and more -- can't help but effect you on a visceral level. It's just not storytelling. It's cinema as a series of moody vignettes with the story as an afterthought to try to justify the endeavor according to classical moviemaking tenets. The Ring is the horror movie equivalent of softcore: a guilty pleasure that isn't.