BEFORE: I've got today off, last day off for a while, because I'm headed into Hell Week, aka New York Comic Con week. I worked yesterday at the theater on a shift starting at 6 am, so that threw off my whole sleeping schedule, which is not good news going into NYCC week. So I took a nap on Saturday afternoon when I came home, stayed up to watch "Quasi" but then overslept going into Sunday, which was my wife's birthday. I'm glad I got us a dinner reservation for 6 pm and not earlier, as we seniors are likely to get. Anyway, all of this put my movie watching on the back burner a bit, so I'm going to double-up on the "Ring" movies tonight and then I should be back on track. But I'm only watching four more films before I shut down for the duration of the Comic-Con, you know how this goes, I have to be at the booth for 10 or 11 hours at a time, and it doesn't stop for four days, unless I can find someone to cover MY shift on Sunday.
BUT if I can make it through Hell Week (NYCC will be followed by NewFest and then the New Yorker Festival at the theater), then there are just 14 horror films to go this month, then after 2 weeks comes a real break, no movies until just before Thanksgiving, and a week out of NY down in North Carolina in November. So some form of vacation is on the horizon.
Brian Cox carries over again from "Quasi".
THE PLOT: A journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it.
AFTER: There's a bunch of these "death is stalking you" movies that were made back in the day, like last year I watched "One Missed Call", which was quite ridiculous - where a person gets a cell phone call from their future self, and they learn about the exact moment they're going to die the next day. There's nothing they can do to stop it, so this might make you wonder WHY they get the phone call announcing their impending doom, if the time and method of death can't be changed, the goal I guess is just to ensure they spend the last 24 hours of their life in abject terror and dread. Then the presence picks a number saved in their phone and calls the next victim with a similar message pre-recorded in the future, and so on.
Then there's the "Final Destination" series, which I have not been able to link to yet, and there's one called "It Follows", I haven't gotten to that one either. But they all maybe trace back to "The Ring" from 2002, or perhaps to the 1998 Japanese horror film that "The Ring" was based on. Here death is coming in seven days for anyone who watches a certain video-tape. Two teen girls are sitting around, talking about the tape, and one pretends that she saw the film seven days ago - ha, ha, she was only kidding to scare her friend! But then it turns out she wasn't kidding after all, she was spending time with her boyfriend a week ago and they watched "the tape". They also discuss some B.S. about electro-magnetic waves, and how energy is always flowing around us and through our brains, as if that helps explain how watching a VHS tape can KILL YOU.
So yeah, Katie's a goner, because she watched the tape a week ago and, umm, forgot to tell anyone about it until the last minute? Sure enough, she gets a phone call from the mysterious force that tells her she's about to die, and then she gets scared TO DEATH by umm, something, it's a bit unclear. But at the funeral, Katie's mother asks her sister Rachel to see if she can find out more about Katie's death, because Rachel is a journalist, and that's the ONLY profession that's allowed to ask questions about things. Rachel agrees because her son Aidan was close to his cousin, Katie, and they spent time together a couple days every week.
Oh, yeah, Aidan has some kind of supernatural ability, like he's been making drawings for the last week about a girl being buried, and also he's been drawing a house with a well and an attic room. Probably not important, at least not yet. Aidan's psychic drawings are kind of a nod to films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Shining" - or maybe he's just a weird kid dealing with tragedy the only way he can, it's a little tough to say.
Anyway, Rachel investigates the place where Katie (and all of her now-dead friends) was a week ago, which is the Shelter Mountain Inn, where I guess all the teens go to get laid? The only entertainment available to the guests at the inn is one jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, one game of Parcheesi and a limited selection of VHS tapes, including the one that KILLS YOU seven days later. So, umm, forgive me for asking, but why does anyone watch that tape? I mean, teens today take drugs and eat Tide Pods, so they don't exactly have the best judgment, but how bad are the other movies at the inn when people guests want to watch the tape that kills them? Are the only other movies "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Howard the Duck"?
So Rachel does the only thing she can think to do to learn more, she watches the videotape. Yeah, umm, sure. She's an adult, she heard that watching this tape can KILL YOU and then that's the first thing she does. Great. She gets the phone call with the ominous whispering voice that says "Seven days...." and somehow she does not regret her decision to watch the video. OK, sure, let's proceed. Maybe deep down she just doesn't believe the hype, really, because no movie could be so bad that it kills you, unless it's "Miss March" or "Norm of the North". But now there's a ticking clock, she's got 7 days to figure out who made the tape and how it's killing people, or she faces death herself. Right.
Thankfully, her ex-husband is a video-tape analyst, because somehow that's a job back in 2002. The film isn't even all that scary, it looks a bit like a Bunuel film from the early days of silent movies - there's a ladder, there's a lighthouse, a giant millipede, some things that are semi-spooky, but nothing outright scary. So the film itself isn't scaring people to death, but some malevolent entity is tracking down the people who watched it and haunting them or subjecting them to psychological trauma, you know, because of energy and stuff, and I guess the power of filmmaking. And it's not even that the film is SO BAD that people who watch it want to die, like with "Popeye" or "The Cat in the Hat", apparently it's something else.
Rachel identifies a woman on the tape, a horse breeder named Anna Morgan, who committed suicide after a number of her horses drowned themselves. She lived out on Moesko Island, and as Rachel is traveling there, a horse being transported on the same ferry breaks free and jumps off the boat. Then when she meets Anna's widower husband, Richard, who tells her about their adopted daughter, Samara, he then commits suicide himself. Man, people and horses were all just desperate to get out of this movie!
Samara apparently also had psychic abilities, which she used to - umm, torture the horses? She could psychically etch images into people's minds, whatever that means. There's a video-tape of her explaining her powers during a therapy session, and honestly the timeline doesn't really match up here, because Anna made a film that looked like a 1920's short film, and Samara was recorded on video-tape in the what, 1980's? I can't tell when anything in the past took place, the timeline here is all screwed up somehow. Very frustrating.
NITPICK POINT: There's a drawing of a tree on the wall in the Morgan, home, and once Rachel and Noah peel off all the wallpaper, they see the tree, which Rachel immediately recognizes as the tree near the Shelter Mountain Inn. REALLY? There are hundreds of trees on the island, thousands of trees in the Seattle area, and Rachel immediately recognizes ONE tree in particular? COME ON, the drawing was made thirty or forty years ago, that tree couldn't possibly look exactly the same, assuming it's still standing. Trees do eventually fall over or die or get hit by lightning or destroyed in fires, they don't all last quite that long.
Rachel and Noah then find that under the motel where Katie watched the tape, there's a well that leads down to - I don't know, hell or something? Apparently Anna Morgan threw her evil adopted daughter Samara down the well and it took her seven days to die or something? Thus the spirit of Samara kills people using the possessed VHS tape? A bit of a stretch, to put things mildly.
NITPICK POINT #2: There's a dead body in the video room, and Rachel's dealing with the trauma, but when she sees his girlfriend arriving and getting on the freight elevator, she doesn't even stop her, so a second person gets to experience the trauma of discovering the body? Not cool - how about a simple, "Hey, stop, don't go up there!" - or is that too much to ask?
Rachel somehow frees the soul of Samara from the well, and they give her body a proper burial, but that's not the end of the story, because young Aidan and his mother Rachel (who both watched the tape) figure out the loophole - Rachel copied the tape and showed it to someone else, and that freed her from the 7-day curse. So all Aidan has to do is the same thing, copy the tape and show it to someone else, and then THEY will be cursed, not him. Ah, so it's more like the "Star Wars Holiday Special", then. That I definitely understand.
Also starring Naomi Watts (last seen in "Infinite Storm"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), David Dorfman (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jane Alexander (last seen in "Three Christs"), Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Rachael Bella (last seen in "The Crucible"), Daveigh Chase, Shannon Cochran (last seen in "Captive State"), Sandra Thigpen, Richard Lineback (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Sasha Barrese (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Tess Hall, Adam Brody (last seen in "American Fiction"), Alan Blumenfeld (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Pauley Perrette, Joe Chrest (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Ronald William Lawrence, Stephanie Erb (last seen in "Fearless"), Sara Rue (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), Joe Sabatino (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Joanna Lin Black, Keith Campbell (last heard in "Rango", Chuck Hicks (last seen in "Everybody's All-American"), Michael Spound (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Gary Carlos Cervantes (last seen in "Stick"), Aixa Clemente (last seen in "Stand and Deliver"), Art Frankel (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Billy Lloyd, Guy Richardson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 blurry photographs
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