Scary, but stupid and humorless too

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2003)

`The Ring' is a horror movie as slick and stylish as a music video--and as pretentious. Sure the imagery is beautiful, but the approach is so self-important--and, more significantly, so humorless--that you feel like you're watching a Calvin Klein ad much of the time.
To be fair, `The Ring' can be terribly scary, especially for a movie rated PG-13. The movie does have the quality of a genuine nightmare, even if the techniques used to achieve that effect are overly self-conscious and obvious. And, with the exception of the first scene, it resists the temptation to be yet another ripoff of `Scream.'
Unfortunately, it's a ripoff of just about every other horror movie ever made, though I'm sure Gore Verbinski would prefer to think of it as an `homage.' Tomato/tomahto; call it what you will, but there are direct visual quotations from at least ten and probably more like fifteen or twenty classic horror films. As a scary movie buff, I found it distracting and annoying: `Oh, that's from When a Stranger Calls,' and `Oh, that's from The Omen,' and `Oh, that's from The Shining,' and `Oh, that's from The Changeling.' Verbinksi obviously studied the genre meticulously before making this movie; it's just too bad he couldn't come up with some original ideas instead of recycling other people's into a relentless shock-movie mélange. At times I felt like I was watching a new version of `Terror in the Aisles.'
It doesn't help that the story is preposterous. I won't give away any spoilers here, but I will say that every plot development is head-bangingly dumb, and it gets boring after a while. Now I realize we're talking about a horror movie here, and so a little suspension of disbelief comes with the territory. And maybe if the movie could laugh at itself a little bit, I'd be inclined to forgive its faults. But it has all the dull gravity of the most excruciating art-house `masterpiece' you ever saw, and that doesn't help it one bit.
Performances are OK; the only real standout is David Dorfman as the kid; he kind of looks like one of the orphans from `The Cider House Rules' would after spending a year at the bottom of a lake. Gratuitous underwear scene aside, Naomi Watts doesn't show much of the promise she did in `Mulholland Drive,' and Brian Cox and Jane Alexander are pretty much wasted.
But the point of a horror movie is to be scary, and, like I said, the movie does that pretty well in places. If you can stomach its stupidities and other problems, you'll probably be entertained. 6 out of 10.