KMR

A decent spooker - it doesn't live up to many of the rave reviews it has received, but it's not bad at all. Most horror films these days are so by-the-numbers that the better ones like this often get graded higher on a curve. As with so many ghost stories I found Conjuring's windup better and way more frightening than the eventual climactic events - the atmosphere was so dread-filled that I (a died-in-the-wool horror veteran) was genuinely uneasy for the first half hour or so. As more was revealed it got less frightening - I still find that the less you see, the less you know, the more your imagination has to fill in the blanks - the scarier a movie tends to be. The performances were all top-notch, particularly Vera Farmiga as the medium; special mention should be made of the younger actresses, who were all very believable. Definitely the best horror film of 2013 that I've seen, but again, I'm grading it on a curve.

Ringu tells its story with a quiet eerie power and is a fascinating film to re-watch. There are certain implications made earlier in the tale that contribute to an overall circular motion, a ring that has no bottom and no top, an endless chain of events (for the record--yes, I know the Ring of the title refers to the ring of the telephone after the tape is viewed but there is still this aspect of completing-the-circle in the story structure); certain unsettling questions are left to the viewer to ponder afterward and this is a good thing. Listen, for example, to Yoichi's explanation as to who told him to watch the tape (the implication being that death is not necessarily the end for Sadako's victims); note also the hooded figure in the video and its reappearance near the end of the film and the name to which the heroine assigns to it (the question here is along the lines of whether certain events were preordained from the start)....all of this is interesting stuff to mull over. Told with simplicity and economy, Ringu is superior to the American remake -- in itself still a good thriller but one short on subtlety -- a textbook example of Japanese horror at its most inventive and frightening.

Lovely Nicole Kidman is obviously game and tries hard but has little to work with here. Bette Midler is unappealing and the actor saddled with the supposedly funny flamboyant gay role is sunk by the embalmed material. Glenn Close plays the campy it's-really-a-drag-queen part that we encounter in seemingly every Paul Rudnick-scripted film - and lately in many Glenn Close films as well; I like her a lot better when she's actually giving a real performance not working overtime on broadly comic schtick. (Memo to screenwriter Rudnick, from the mouth of that smart underground filmmaker, Bruce LaBruce: "being gay is not enough."). Bryan Forbes, Katherine Ross and Paula Prentiss, et.al did this movie much, much better back in 1975, and it should have been left at that. The Stepford Wives is, for all its efforts, another pointless, badly written (the plot holes are already legendary), and yes, mechanical Hollywood remake.