The Ring was a film I had been looking forward to seeing for quite some time. I’ve read many an opinion on the Japanese version, also entitled The Ring and it’s follow up ‘Ringu’. When I heard that they were making an English version of the film I was getting a little excited. I’m one of those that cannot be bothered reading subtitles in a film as I think it takes away the enjoyment, so even though I had heard good things about The Ring, I never did get round to watching it.

It’s a good film though, and deserved of it’s highly recommended reviews, I just wish people would stop saying how scary things are when they really are not…now put this film into the ‘weird’ classification and it will come out tops sitting proudly alongside some other very weird films.

The film gives you a damn good start. We meet two girls, the typical type of American teens yabbering on about nothing until they start talking about the evil ‘tape’. This is the tape that’s supposed to kill you if you watch it, and guess what, one of the girls has watched it. She doesn’t believe any of it and makes a joke out of things, that is until the TV comes to haunt her. We progress to her funeral and see flashbacks of what happened. This is one gruesome death and the one flash you will see at the start of the film of the dead girl will be enough to get you prepared for the rest of the film.

She tracks down the tape and starts doing some investigations. She finds out that Naomi’s boyfriend was also killed at exactly the same time that her niece was killed, pure coincidence? There has to be something behind it, and Naomi soon finds herself coming up with other people who have coincidentally died. Surely it can’t be the tape…or can it? She gives the tape a watch, and straight afterwards, the phone rings. The ‘person’ on the other end just says ‘7 days’ and hangs up. That’s it…but Naomi still not believing decides to drag some other people into the equation and goes on a detective mystery after the tape and finds some shocking revelations.

There are special effects throughout this film and they are damn good ones. There’s a scene where a horse is let loose and the horse has gone insane. How they did some of the stuff with this horse is beyond me, and there’s a bit in here than animal lovers will absolutely hate, especially horse lovers, it’s a good job I have a keen eye and could see that it is a computer generated horse, as good as it was, it really did look real. Other effects are also damn good, and really will draw you into the film.

Well, this is the problem with the film. There are so many loopholes is barley believable. How did these images get to tape, how did they get to where they were, where did Naomi get all her clues from…what the hell is happening? There’s a twist at the end of the film that leaves you thinking ‘but what if’ which is always particularly bad unless it’s supposed to be a movie that does this kind of thing (ala Cube). It just didn’t leave me feeling fulfilled, maybe this is what the sequel is for, I really don’t know, but I did think we trundled through the movie just watching pictures and thinking we had made sense of it, but you haven’t, you will always think ‘well how did that get there, how did that happen’

Go see it, you will like it, it might even frighten some of you, I know Final Destination 2 did….but don’t expect the film to wrap itself up nicely at the end, because it simply doesn’t!