A horror dud

This dud by director Gore Verbinski is being marketed as if it were the scariest thing since The Blair Witch Project.

The only shock is how incomprehensible it all is. I don't expect rational explanations for a story about a demoniacal video which, if played, brings an instant telephone call from some evil subscriber promising the viewer that he/she shall die within seven days. But I do expect a bare minimum of narrative sense. In this incoherent mess, there's none at all.

Freaky culture buffs will recognise it as an Americanised remake of Hideo Nakata's Japanese horrorflick, relocated to Seattle's rainy city and misty off-shore islands.

It stars Naomi Watts, last seen at her address on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as a journo whose curiosity exposes her to the lethal video. She has a little boy of the solemn-eyed sort who you think will be saying "I see dead people" any minute. He sees the tape, too.

Mom enlists her computer geek boyfriend (Martin Henderson, another of the teen-screen's legion of unshaven hunks) to solve the riddle and save their lives as titles tick off the days left.

The tape's trail leads them to overweight (and overwrought) Brian Cox sinking into the mud on a soggy island. Unwilling (or unable) to make sense of his role, Cox stages his own bathtub electrocution as if rigging up the whole of the Christmas lights in Regent Street.

Nothing makes sense. It's all mystification for mystification's sake. Every now and then, your eardrums are shattered by an obscenely amplified Dolby Digital Sound-bite fright: in short, all the jump-start clichès of a debased genre.

The one sequence that generates real alarm has to do with a horse breaking loose aboard a ferry-boat and hurdling the cars before plunging over the side of the ship and being churned to bloody froth in the propellers' wake. We're told no animals were harmed in making the film. But, as an apposite cartoon in the current New Yorker magazine asks, were they compensated?

Film distributors have started releasing some of their product such as this on the public before critics get to set eyes on it; no wonder, they don't want news of this contemptible catchpenny to leak out before a few pounds are taken off the gullible.

The video itself looks like the work of a film school's hack freshman. I wouldn't give The Ring as long as seven days before it expires.

The Ring
Cert: 15