Ring: Kanzenban (1995)
Directed by Chisui Takigawa
In 1995 Fuji Television aired a TV movie based on a Horror novel by Koji Suzuki. Later that year a slightly longer version of the film was released on VHS. That's the version (which features more nudity, and has a few extra scenes) that I watched. Three years later in 1998 the story was filmed again, and released theatrically, becoming a international hit and leading to a huge upswing in interest in Asian Horror in general, and Japanese Horror in particular.
Like a lot of people I was introduced to the Ring through the American remake. I was pretty impressed, and more so again when I saw (what I thought was) the original Japanese version. The American remake was slicker, but I thought the elements of Japanese folklore left out by the Americans, allowed the story to make more sense. Either way it was interesting that just as one branch of new Horror, was going in a gut churning explicit direction (Alexandre Aja's Haute Tension came out only a year after the American Ring), another branch, also very popular was getting slow and spooky.
Anyway as you can imagine I was excited to sit down and watch the first filmed version of such an important recent Horror story. I knew going in that this was a TV movie, and so I wasn't expecting the style or production values of the later versions. Luckily though, the Japanese, like the British don't let a little thing like no money for special effect stop them from taking on an ambitious fantasy story. Right from the beginning Director Chisui Takiga, is making use of dramatic camera movements, and subjective lighting to make the most out of what he's got. In the first scene a teenage girl is attacked by an unseen force, and chased around her house, before dying of apparent heart failure. In this scene we get the first hint of the long haired ghost that unfortunately doesn’t show up again in the this movie but has since gone on to become a classic movie monster. The girl's uncle is a down on his luck journalist, who witnessed another young person die of heart failure at about the same time. When more coincidental death are uncovered, he takes on the case (against his editors instructions) and discovers a mysterious video tape watched by the dead teens a week past. Of course he watches the tape, and learns that he has a week to live. Soon he, and the psychic who ruined his life are travelling all over Japan trying to discover the secret of the mysterious tape and the person who made it.
As I said, the TV version lacks the polish of the remakes, and never quite nails the atmosphere of dread that made The Ring a world wide household name, but it works pretty well on it's own terms. It comes across like a Japanese Twilight Zone, which i s not to bad at all. This hasn't been released on DVD that I know of but there is a subtitled VHS version floating around the internet. It's worth tracking down.
No comments:
Post a Comment