3/4  The Ring Quick Review
this is the backstory of sadako, before she became a monster. she was actually completely adorable.

4/5 Good Urban Legend
  by Mimi P. Louiso (Atlanta GA)
Creepy, not too gory, great suspense. Naomi Watts is tortured by Samara in this movie. Keeps your attention and you will watch it more than once as you will see things you missed the first go around

5/5 Outstanding, Haunting And Shocking Horror
  by Stephen B. O'Blenis (Nova Scotia, Canada)
Remakes of Asian horror movies have been a bit of a mixed bag. They're almost always at least good, but many times a fair bit behind the original versions. 'The Ring', the movie that started the trend, is actually one of the ones that exceeds its predecessor. It keeps everything that made Ringu good, but benefits from some added angles, better special effects, and deeper characterization on some of the supporting players. Also, it's not a shot-by-shot remake: in several instances backstory elements have been substitued for an alternate take on things. In this case, both the original and the remake had equally cool takes on the backstory. But I've always felt that if you're going to do a remake you just have to do Some things differently so it actually Is a different take on the same idea, not just a reshooting of the exact same movie. The Ring differentiated itself enough so that you'll want to watch both versions, and enjoy not only the same theme but the differences here and there. [Note - there's also a third version, The Ring Virus, a Korean remake of Ringu that came out, I believe, before the American remake. I've really got to get on the ball and see that one too.)

The basic premise behind The Ring is now one of the best known set-ups in horror: there's a videotape out there, of unknown origin, and everyone who watches it dies exactly seven days later. In addition, immediately after watching the tape, the viewer receives a phone call as a warning of their fate. You never hear exactly what's said on the call, but you can just make out enough of it that, by that and the reaction of the person receiving the call (this is one of the things that really made The Ring so great - the tremendous jobs various performers did in reacting to things that aren't fully shown on screen) it really brings an instant air of sinister otherworldliness. Naomi Watts plays the reporter who investigates this strange urban legend after four kids die after watching the tape - one of them her niece - and eventually comes into possession of the tape itself. Totally disbelieving of any truth to the supernatural legend, she nonetheless watches the tape, looking for possible clues. And proceeds to receive the phone call that all viewers are said to receive. It quickly becomes impossible to discount anything about the legend, and worse still, Watts is horrified to get up one morning and find her young son Aidan (David Dorfman) innocently watching the video he found. Now it's a race against time to track down the origins of the tape and try to stop the curse before it reaches its fated conclusion. The trail leads to the story of a little girl named Samara (Daveigh Chase), now dead several years...

The Ring is a multi-layered horror story that gets scarier and scarier as it unfolds, riveting from the start but leaving the biggest and most memorable frights for the end stages. The visual imagery of The Ring has become iconic in horrordom, including the stone well, first seen on the videotape itself, and the climax is a masterpiece. Outstanding performances all around. This is a horror must-have.

5/5 The Ring is the BEST scary movie - EVER!!!
  by K. Walters (Atlanta, GA)
I LOVE this movie. Scary but not over-the-top with gore and not a slasher movie (which are okay in their own right). Really great plot to follow. If you like scary movies that keep you on the edge of your seat with suspense, this is one to watch!

5/5 Best since Psycho and The Exorcist
  by Jazzy Jeff (Upstate NY)
I walked into this movie totally blank...that is, I started watching this having no idea what the heck the film was about. It starts off being what I thought to be a typical killer stalks kids kind of a thing. Some kids watch a video and end up a few days later disfigured and dead. If you know nothing about the movie and like scary flicks, don't finish reading this review and never read any review. Just watch the thing alone and at night...at 2 in the morning would be good.

I thought this movie ranks up there with The Exorcist and Psycho. This is truly a horror classic. Now, that being said, I've seen reviews in which people have felt it being "a typical horror movie" and not all that scary. Of course, I also know people that thought The Exorcist was campy and good for a laugh. For me, though, there was tension through out the whole movie, which kept building and building, and I nearly wet myself during THE scene.

I'll admit I happened to watch this thing at about 2 in the morning and was, as I stated, unaware of the good reviews this thing had. Certainly the shock of a good movie that I just happened across always makes a good movie that much better but, in the end, you have to praise a good movie for just being good.

Folks, this is a top ten classic horror flick. It's that simple.

2/5 Ringu Was Much Better
  by Silver Dragon (New York, NY)
I watched Ringu first. Then watched The Ring. After about half an hour into The Ring, it was pretty clear it was going to be a trainwreck compared to Ringu.

Ringu had a much more creepy feel to it. It wasn't overdone at all, it left much more to the imagination, and was much more dramatic than The Ring (like, for example, in Ringu, when the protagonist answers the phone, she hears the same sounds heard on the tape, and slams the phone down, while in The Ring, a cliche' voice says, "You have seven days" and then she just puts the phone down; the faces of the victims are scarier in Ringu, partly because they're not clearly overdone makeup). The tape in The Ring was too long and seemed like someone just randomly put together a sequence just for shock value, while in Ringu it was short and sweet, was genuinely creepy, and it looked like something that could have come from beyond the grave. To be really honest, I got kind of bored with the tape in The Ring.

The boy in Ringu also has a much creepier feel about him, the fact that he almost never opens his mouth adds to the creepiness of the whole movie, while in The Ring he seems to be a pretty major character and talks quite a lot, which detracted.

The one nice thing in The Ring was the sequence with the horse running through the ferry, but that had to be spoiled (by the way, there's no way that ever happened, because it's common knowledge not to start instigating a horse in a trailer).

There are two main issues with The Ring: (1) You kind of don't care if the whole cast lives or dies, while in Ringu one was very much routing for the protagonist, her son, and even her ex-husband, and (2) The Ring relies heavily on shock value and drags when there isn't any shock value, while Ringu just creeped under your skin and didn't drive it into the ground.