This is what passes for great horror today?

Rating: Null/10 (4 March 2003)

I'm not even going to waste time writing a full review here. This film is all style, no substance. It's full of plotholes and general stupidity. The characters follow totally illogical paths to arrive at completely pointless "answers" and along the way there's a whole lot of creepy visual non-sequiturs. In a film like The Sixth Sense, a revelation is made which follows back to another revelation and so forth until the whole story is made stunningly clear. In The Ring, things are built up as revelations, but they explain nothing. There are no answers. There aren't even open-ended questions as an intentional choice. There are just a lot of creepy things thrown in here for no good reason. I'm not prone to exaggeration and hyperbole, so when I say that this is one of the worst films I've ever seen, especially relative to the hype it received, I mean it's a special kind of bad. Don't buy it. Don't rent it. Don't let friends persuade you to watch it. They're stupid and they lie.