The American script doctors took great lengths to flesh out the character of Samara. As a result, we see her childhood room, her video archives from the mental institution... The heroine even sees her at the bottom of the well, just in case anyone in the audience forgot who the movie was about.

In contrast, Ringu's Sadako is stumbled upon pretty late in the film, as that film's heroine joins her ex-husband in an ESP epiphany. The back story of Sadako is more vague, but deliberately so, I think — at least the filmmakers didn't add an extra half-hour to the running time trying to explain it!

After Ringu the well scene in The Ring made me laugh out loud... So the heroine gets pushed into the well by a 70's-vintage television set?!

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Okay, so I'm about to talk about the scariest scene in the film — this is seriously your last chance to stop reading and go out and see it instead!

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The climactic scene in both movies shows the audience how Sadako/Samara makes good on her seventh-day death threat. In Ringu, the effect of Sadako coming out of the television set is just a bit cheap, compared to the flawless visual effects of Hollywood's Samara. But in The Ring, Samara is still plagued by a poor TV signal as she waltzes across the ex-husband's studio floor, a dumb effect that for me took her out of the reality of the scene. And while, Ringu shows only Sadako's eye, for me it's as lasting an image as the demonic Samara's full face.

The Message

By now, you're probably getting the idea that I fancied Ringu substantially more than The Ring, and you're right. Maybe this will convince you too: What saves both heroines from the video's curse is that they have made a copy of it and made someone else watch. Both heroines lift the curse from their kids by making them do the same. In the Japanese film the little boy Koichi is told that the cycle of viewing and copying the video must be spread far and wide, until everyone everywhere has seen it. I'm not entirely sure what the message is here — at first I thought the filmmakers were encouraging piracy, but it's probably more along the lines of "knowledge is power", or "information wants to be free".

At any rate, it's certainly more warm and fuzzy than what we get in The Ring; in that movie the Haley Joel Osment wannabe asks his mom what'll happen to the person he gives his copy of the cursed video to, and gets silence for an answer. So the message here is "we'll take care of own, screw y'all"... Nice!

The Winner

Ringu, by a country mile... At least until I get my hands on the Korean version!