Hey folks, Harry here with a lowlife we call Mr Beaks... Why? He's always sticking that beak of his where it isn't wanted. That's right... he's a snooper, the king of the schnoozes... a bloodhound for Nitro stock and pounded pages of pulp. He's Mr Beaks, and while he's a dirty bastard for what he did to me that night in that hotel room in New York... The visions I had... the muscles that ached. I'll never forget that gap between those webbed fingers of his... Eerie... Creepy in the same sort of way that his freshly plucked gooselivered skin reminded one of the artificial turf on High School tracks... He's evil and he liked THE RING remake quite a bit - beware of extensive descriptions!
THE RING (w. Ehren Kuger & Scott Frank, d. Gore Verbinski)
For a little over a year in the late 1990’s, I worked for a ramshackle news gathering organization in New York City where we took in raw, uncensored satellite feeds from around the globe and then transmitted them for profit. The business itself was faltering so badly that, being run by clueless executives who’d soon prove unemployable once we were gobbled up by the Associated Press, our workplace quickly turned into the zany milieu of a thousand failed sit-coms. Of the many colorful characters that populated the place, there was an MCR tech who, when not getting stoned and watching “Lost in Space” episodes off of the Sci-Fi Network, dutifully recorded all of the nastiest images we took in. It was all compiled on what was plainly referred to as “The Tape”. Upon hearing of this collection of misery, and tiring of my daylong work load which consisted of letting work orders pile up on my desk while I posted on some renegade movie site’s Talk Back forum, it took me all of fifteen minutes before I was up in the newsroom badgering the guy to play it for me in one of the unused editing bays.
I erred…… badly.
“The Tape” didn’t take long in living up to its reputation, kicking off with perhaps the most disturbing piece of live footage ever broadcast on American television: the 1987 suicide of disgraced Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer (do a Yahoo search at your own peril). After watching that segment in its entirety, I quickly ejected the tape before the next inhumanity unspooled. As I damn near staggered out of the editing bay, “The Tape’s” proud papa asked me if I wanted a copy. I tersely declined, but then couldn’t help asking how many copies he’d made for other employees. I shouldn’t have been shocked to learn that not only did most of the newsroom folk have their own copy, but many of them had duplicated it for friends, as well. After all, it was a twelve-car pile-up committed to videotape, without the snarling traffic and neck craning. And I’d joined in the perpetuation of its myth.
It’s that base, communal transmission of misery that Hideo Nakata tapped into with his 1998 cult phenomenon, RINGU (itself an adaptation of a popular Japanese novel), which featured this corker of a premise: what if we ran across a bootleg videotape that, by watching it, punished us for getting off on the misfortune of others? Unfortunately, despite a creepy opening and the video itself – a frightening collage of inscrutably disturbing imagery worthy of David Lynch – Nakata‘s film was largely unable to sustain the pervasive sense of dread necessary to put a film so riddled with plot inconsistencies over the top, which is why I personally welcomed an American adaptation so long as it was in the right hands (meaning any studio other than Warner Brothers), though I must admit to a bit of reticence upon hearing Gore Verbinski, a talented commercial director with an underwhelming film resume, was hired to direct from a script by Ehren Kruger, whose only decent script was his first: ARLINGTON ROAD.
Well, one Scott Frank polish later, and, lo and behold, Verbinski has delivered not only the most accomplished work of his career, but the most viscerally unnerving American horror film of the year that doesn’t devolve into a laughably contrived Sunday sermon. By providing a fuller, more twisted backstory to explain the origin of the tape, and heading down wholly unexpected narrative alleys, THE RING transcends mere scary movie status, trading in cheap scares for a pervasive sense of dread that grows heavier with each horrible twist. And whereas Nakata unfortunately felt the need to vaguely demonize Sada as a goblin (I’ve not seen the other films in the series, so forgive my ignorance if this is not how things turn out), Verbinski depicts his Samara as an innocent looking little girl who intends to inflict her suffering on anyone unlucky enough to cross her path.
One such person is Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), a workaholic single mother with a precocious child prone to predicting the death of family members (in this case, his teenage cousin, Becca) a full week before their demise. Intrigued by the apparent heart-attack suffered by this healthy, vivacious fourteen year-old girl, Rachel digs for anything unusual with which her niece may have been involved. She expects to uncover evidence of some illicit drug use, but is instead regaled with the peculiar story of a videotape that, when watched, is followed by a phone call informing the viewer that they will be dead in seven days.
After some snooping around, Rachel finds out that Becca and her friends spent a secretive weekend at a low-rent resort in the mountains, which is where the videotape has been residing on the shelf in the managers office, snuggled among the reputable likes of Hitchcock’s FAMILY PLOT and the landmark Reb Brown vehicle YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (thus, implying that the videotape is rented not so much out of curiosity as necessity). Allowing her reporter instincts to get the better of her, Rachel goes back to the cabin in which the kids stayed and pops in the tape. A few minutes later, the phone rings, and Rachel’s mad scramble to save her life has begun.
Luckily for her, Rachel’s ex-husband, Noah() is a film/video expert, and though their relationship could be charitably described as “chilly”, he decides to help her to determine the origin of the videotape, even if he’s putting himself on the path to his own mortal end by getting involved. Of course, matters are complicated when their child stumbles across the tape as well, thus heightening Rachel’s desperation to work out the seemingly indecipherable mysteries within the video.
For a major studio horror film, there’s an unexpected fearlessness on display in THE RING, particularly concerning a left-field equine encounter on a boat that ranks as one of the more disturbing set pieces I’ve seen in years. It’s liberating to see Verbinski and his writers eschew traditional narrative in favor of a surreal, symbol-driven mystery where it isn’t ever entirely clear as to what each discovery means, and still isn’t at the film’s conclusion. As Rachel accumulates clues in a desperate, grasping-at-straws attempt to save her entire brood, it never seems important that there’s absolutely no reason to believe that solving Samara’s murder will magically lift the curse. But as each passing day brings Rachel closer to her potential doom, it simply feels like the only option because the only other possibility – that the tape is a malevolent force from which there is no salvation – is just too horrible to imagine.
There are any myriad ways to cop-out on this premise – and for a second, I thought Verbinski (as if commanded by the Almighty Spielberg himself) had succumbed to his worst commercial instincts with a love conquers all moment – but the filmmakers stay the dour course with a final scene as bleak and disquieting as Nakata’s was cheerily macabre. I don’t know if there’s any effort afoot at Dreamworks to soften this ending, but it would be criminal to see such an unremittingly dark work ruined by a sunnier denouement.
As a society increasingly fascinated with the travails of others, the idea of an unstoppable evil spirit with an unquenchable bloodlust using our morbid curiosity as bait might be as timely as it ever will be. As it stands, I can’t wait to see this again in its locked-in form; the more I think about it, Verbinski’s THE RING might be the most effective cautionary genre piece since Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Had I seen it before my run-in with “The Tape”, I might’ve thought twice before bolting my desk to go slumming. I might’ve *thought twice*, but I still would’ve watched.
Gotta run….. phone’s ringing.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
