Creepy, but not as frightening as I'd hoped.

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2004)

I bought into the hype, I admit it. All I kept hearing upon this films release was "Oh my god it's SOOOO SCARY!!!" So I went to see it with a group of friends, preparing to be scared out of my skirt and really looking forward to it. Well, the film was beautifully shot and genuinely creepy, but not at all as scary as I had hoped it would be.
Everyone knows the story by now: A weird videotape with disconcerting, but seemingly unconnected images, has the power to kill anyone who views it exactly seven days later. A group of teens view it and, sure enough, within a week they are all dead. One girl's dreadful corpse is found horribly bloated, ghastly discolored and waterlogged, in her bedroom closet. This is the one scene that literally made me jump, but it was very brief. The rest of the film concerns the efforts of this unfortunate girls Aunt to solve the mystery of the video...a mystery that becomes more urgent when she views it herself and receives a creepy phone call from a little girl who simply tells her: "Seven days."
A warning to people who are irritated by ambiguous endings (like me):
The mystery surrounding the murder of a little girl remains ambiguous to the films final scenes. We never truly know why she was so inherently evil, how she created the video or why she refuses to rest. These questions are left for the viewer to answer. However, you will see some really good performances, some absolutely stunning scenery and a startling climax featuring a dripping wet ghost emerging from a television screen. However, I couldn't help but feel that the film was about 20 minutes too long and the plot rather flimsy if thought about too hard. Still, it's a pretty decent ghost story that will succeed in scaring many a viewer. The ghostly images on the cursed videotape itself makes this movie worth watching.