About as scary as an over cooked tater tot
Yes and it's amazing what the Americans were able to do with taking ''this'' material and reworking it. ''Ringu'' produced no emotion, fear or suspense.
shareAgree. It must've been good at the time it came out, with a new horror concept and all, but IMO the Hollywood remake was far superior in terms of acting, script and cinematography. And much scarier. The actual video in the tape was also way more intense and disturbing compared to the dull original version.
A lot of people tend to romanticize foreign productions and pan Hollywood movies. Some cases are probably deserving of that but a lot of movies are unfairly criticized - Rec and Quarantine is another example and so is The Grudge (not the 2019 remake, which was rubbish). Rec is a good movie, but I think Quarantine is much better.
Well the Gore Verbinski version is a very good remake, I will give you that. But it pretty much copies a lot of the shots verbatim from the original, and it lacks a certain subtlety the Japanese version has.
It also severely screws up in a number of areas, most notably the infamous tv scene. Whereas in the original the scene never cuts away, in the American one we get a bad, jarring edit that cuts to Naomi Watts trying to call the Noah character, and then speeding through the city in her car like a bad action movie. And the final reveal of Samara’s grumpy face isn’t nearly as scary as Sadako’s demonic eye.
And the videotape, while effective, at times feels like an edgy student art house film rather than a real curses videotape. The sheer unexplainable nature of the original videotape and its random images create a more unsettling feeling.