The Ring

Directed by Gore Verbinski

Written by Ehren Kruger

Starring Naomi Watts, David Dorfman

and Martin Henderson

Classification: AA

Rating: **½

A big-budget American remake of a Japanese sensation, The Ring is based on the premise of a cursed video that causes anyone who sees it to die within a week. The problem is not the content of the video (a collection of disconnected black and white images that suggests a surreal editing experiment from the late 1920s), but its anonymous author. Through the course of the film, it becomes apparent that the video was literally ghost-written -- by a malevolent spirit determined to spread its psychic imprint like a virus on the living population.

DreamWorks's The Ring, directed by Gore Verbinski, feels ghost-written in quite a different way: At best, it's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.

Director Hideo Nakata's original Ringu (1998), based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, had a spooky linearity in its tale of a woman journalist who tries to find the source of a series of teen deaths, including that of her niece. There are much more artistically accomplished and dread-filled Japanese horror films (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse) but Ringu has a pop kick (it spawned two sequels), with its vision of a modern Japan of divorced professional mothers, cellphones and videotape, haunted by its past, represented by a remote volcanic island, where malignant spirits lie in wait.

In its opening scene, The Ring is a $60-million film that does a reasonably good impression of a low-budget teen horror tossoff. This is especially true of the prelude (borrowed directly from the Japanese original), which features plaid-skirted teenaged girls alone in a house, talking sex and urban myths.

Quickly, though, it switches gears and, initially, there's a happy surprise in the casting. The bird-like Australian actress Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive) is the perfectly updated Hitchcockian heroine, a plucky single mom, Rachel Keller, with her emotions well in check. The sad-eyed David Dorfman is distressingly credible as her semi-neglected eight-year-old son, Aidan, whose teacher is worried about his distressingly death-themed drawings.

One of the girls in the prelude, Katie, was Rachel's niece and Aidan's babysitter, and now she has mysteriously died, along with several of her classmates. At the girl's wake, Rachel begins asking questions and traces the tape back to a rustic motel cabin, where the teenagers went to a party.

Rachel drives up to the motel, under the gloomy Pacific Northwest sky, rents a room and takes the tape with her. She watches it, gets the phone call and starts to worry. In her anxiety, she turns to her ex-husband, Noah (Martin Henderson), a callow Peter Pan of a man, who happens to know about videos. Despite a slapdash investigation (there's a television detective-show habit of improbable luck and coincidence at work), Rachel finds some pieces of a puzzle: a video image of a lighthouse that she traces to a local island, the location of a horse farm where the horses went mad.

There she meets Brian Cox, the remaining figure from a family where things went very badly, but the scene is puzzling. Cox (the original Hannibal in Michael Mann's Manhunter) is large, wet-lipped and rheumy-eyed and, hell yes, he's scary. There's just no particular logic as to why he needs to be that way in the story.

Screenwriter Ehren Kruger fails to provide anything beyond one-dimensional characters without background history, a large lapse for a fairly ambitious movie. Given that the entire ghost narrative is related to the effect of a disturbed marriage on a child, it would make sense to offer a tidbit or two about Rachel's own failed marriage. Without real-life grounding, the characters seem little more than functionaries in an elaborate, baffling, paranoid fantasy.

That being said, there are at least a couple of genuinely skin-crawling scenes in The Ring. The first (a narrative red herring) is a jolting sequence when a stallion goes mad on a ferry boat.

The second, lifted directly from the original movie, is the culmination of the movie's double-climax, which is best not described in detail. As in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, it involves a television image made flesh. Though The Ring is only a copy, it still can carry the echo of a real chill.