naomi watts

the ring

In the early 2000s, horror nerds like myself began to discover what was then called J-Horror. This was a cycle of horror movies made in Japan that started in the early 1990s. Unlike the films made in the United States at the time, J-Horror relied more on atmosphere and mood to create their scares. They often involved haunted houses and evil spirits, the supernatural rather than knife-wielding psychopaths that were so popular in America at the time.

Discovering these films was like a fresh of breath air for folks like me who had long since grown tired of slashers. I believe Ringu (1998) was the first J-Horror film to really make a splash here in the US (I’m sure some horror hound could pop in now to tell me they were watching Japanese Hororr films long before Ringu popularized the genre, but whatever). It was a huge film in Japan and had decent success in America.

Enough so that an American producer decided to remake it as The Ring (2002). That movie was a surprise success and started a succession of American remakes of J-Horror films. Snob that I am I watched pretty much all of them, but always preferred the Japanese originals.

Tonight I decided to rewatch The Ring. I liked it more this time than my previous watches.

It is about a VHS tape that kills you after seven days after your first viewing. Typing that out just now makes me realize how dumb that summary sounds. The film on the tape is like a short film some goth art school kid would make to try and freak everybody out. A couple of teenagers watch the tape and seven days later they die horrible deaths. Naomi Watts plays a journalist who was related to one of the teens. She sniffs a story and investigates.

She finds, then watches the creepy tape and immediately after she receives a phone call telling her she has seven days to live. When her young son accidentally watches the tape and starts drawing creepy drawings she knows she has to solve the mystery.

The original Japanese film is super creepy and atmospheric and really good (you can read my review of it over at Cinema Sentries). The remake is very Americanized in that it provides a few more jump scares, has slicker production values, and juices up the narrative a little bit so that the story is explained to the viewer in clearer turns.

Still, it is effective in its own way. The jump scares work for the most part, and it is still moody enough to give it that J-Horror feels even if it is a little sanitized.

down

Friday night comes and I need a horror movie to watch. I really want to watch something I’ve not seen before, but scrolling through my current streaming services doesn’t turn up much. I start to put on The Ring (2002) the American remake of the excellent Japanese film Ringu (1988) with Naomi Watts, but I’ve seen it before, and as I said I’m wanting something new. I land on this film which also stars Naomi Watts. It is about an evil elevator in a New York skyrise and that sounds like fun.

Sometimes when you randomly watch something after flipping through the streaming channels you discover something really good. Sometimes, like tonight, you realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Down is a remake of a Dutch film called The Lift which is something of a cult classic. Dick Maas directed both of them. I haven’t seen the original but if the remake is anything like it I won’t be bothering with it at all.

It seems to be trying for some sort of blending of horror and comedy but it fails at both. The comedy is broad and bad and not all of the actors seem to understand they should be going for laughs, while others seem to think they are in a Marx Brothers film. It was made just before Watts became a star so while she is featured prominently in all the promotional material she actually isn’t the lead. That role goes to James Marshall who, if you are like me, you’ll stare at for a long time trying to remember where you know him from before you finally look it up and realize he was in Twin Peaks. He plays everything quite straight whereas Naomi Watts seems to have walked in from some SNL skit from the early 1990s. She lays it on thick and broad and sports the worst Brooklyn accent I’ve heard in a while.

The film has great character actors like Dan Hedaya and Michael Ironside, Ron Perlman and Edward Hermann in small roles, all of which seem to be playing in different movies.

This is a movie that begins with two security mooks looking through those tourist telescope things on the observation deck of this big skyscraper. They are looking into the window of a nearby window watching a couple of prostitutes get sexy with some dude. It is played for laughs like it’s one of those low-budget comedies the USA Network used to play on Friday nights. It goes downhill from there.

While the comedy is bad the horror is worse. It builds very little suspense, the deaths are sometimes gruesome but never effective. I’d say it was more of a supernatural thriller instead of horror but it isn’t very thrilling either. In the last 15 minutes or so it does switch from just bad to so-bad-its-good territory but by then I was just ready for it to be over.

As an interesting bit of trivia, the film was scheduled for a 2001 release but then 9/11 happened and for obvious reasons, it got pushed back into oblivion. At some point, they think the elevator mishaps are caused by terrorists. There are actually characters who talk about how Bin Laden tried to take down the twin towers which is now kind of creepy. And that’s about as creepy at the film gets.