Whatever happened to logic?

Rating: Null/10 (28 October 2002)

This was one of the most disappointing movies I've seen in a while. Although the premise is excellent and the images creepy, the total lack of logic both in the overall storyline and individual scenes made it so unbelievable that I stopped being scared long before the ending.
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The niece Katie's attitude towards the tape seems inconsistent. She doesn't tell her best friend until the witching hour is upon them (and then makes fun of the idea), yet she tells her much younger cousin she doesn't have much time left. Also how did the rumor of the tape get started? Supposedly the tape got made by Katie and her friends trying to record a football game. If so, she and her friends were the first victims, and there shouldn't be any rumor that the tape actually killed people.
Katie's mother asks her sister Rachel to look into the death because she doesn't understand why a 16-year-old's heart would stop suddenly. Um - wasn't anyone concerned with the way Katie's body looked in those horrifying flashes? (Especially given someone mentioned that "seeing the body" had been one of the things pushing the friend into madness). I'd think any competent coroner would have some questions on how this girl looked drowned, bloated or worse. The movie would have been a lot stronger if the victims had simply dropped dead of fright leaving beautiful corpses.
The tape itself is fine - truly creepy. And it makes sense that Samara broadcasting from the well could impose the images on the videotape being recorded near by. But apparently she wasn't exactly limited to geographical proximity, because long before the taping, she'd been out killing her mother and the horses. As a matter of fact, this kid can use telephones, move objects at will at long distances, control electricity, and pretty much everything else even before she's `helped' out of the well. (I'm still wondering how she killed the kids in the car given they likely weren't near a television set).
The horse scene was extremely well done, tho it made no sense for Naomi to keep messing with the horse despite its rising agitation. But then she does lots of inexplicable things, such as her penchant for leaving dead bodies unreported (except for Samara's). Apparently she not only walked away from the father of her child, but she left Samara's father to be discovered by someone else after his extremely elaborate suicide. (Still wondering why someone would go so far out of his way to electrocute himself especially with someone else in the house).
A lot of the things that affect the characters don't have any explanation. My boyfriend suggested the scribbling over faces was meant to convey Samara's head had been put in the black plastic bag. That might be, but what explanation was there for the distorted faces in pictures and videos? Or the nosebleeds for that matter. A lot of times I felt the only motivation behind the things happening was that it would make the audience jump.
All in all, a movie that should have gone straight to video where at least they could have gotten some real impact out of the self-referential stuff at the end about making a copy and showing it to someone else.