Based on the Japanese film of similar name, The Ring addresses the urban legends and fascination with the non-existent snuff film genre that came of the VHS era, particularly the Faces of Death series. It’s the realization of that dreadful little feeling up your spine that witnessing a real death, or witnessing a bewitched video that sneaks in subliminal images, can somehow damage or even kill you.
Free of Tim Burton’s shackles, director Henry Selick spins a marvelous adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book that is a visual banquet, with superb supporting characters that do double duty in two separate dimensions, or more if you count 3D. This is one of the few movies I wish I had seen in the otherwise worthless format.
Considering the wisecracking clown Freddy eventually became, it’s easy to forget how truly terrifying he was the first time around. Audiences didn’t know what to expect, having been inundated and dulled by countless slashers that followed in the wake of John Carpenter’s trend-setting Halloween.
The orchestrations of prior horror films, most notably the Hammer Studios films, were frenetic and uptempo, something more suited to an action movie today. Williams mostly avoided this zealous use of horns and frantic strings, preferring instead the sweeping romanticism that has since become a hallmark of the Dracula story.
There seems to be an ongoing trend of single-word movie titles happening here. Today’s highlight is an interesting little mind-bender in the vein of Memento (another one!) as the main character tries to piece together what appear to be events of her future.
A little levity never hurt anyone. A lot of levity, however, can make you die laughing. I’m not sure anyone watching this movie in its initial release would have predicted its longevity. Born of the improvisational era of the early 1980s, an era that includes Meatballs, Caddyshack and Stripes, Ghostbusters took the loose format of those former films and gave it a solid structure.