Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Usually it's the Japs stealing American ideas and making them better

[quote name="FABIO"][quote name="Eyo"]Americans made Ring, which was far better than the original. [/quote] Truth. I made a post on this, but it was knocked unconscious and thrown down Veronica's snatch where it survived for seven days. <i>Oh my god! It's back! Crawling out my monitor aAAAAGGGGG</i> Both versions are pretty much identical, scene for scene and plot point for plot point. Even the stuff I thought Hollywood threw in to add "drama" and make it more "marketable" like the precious Haley Joel Osment son and ex-husband thing was present in the Japanese version. What makes the Jap version inferior is its lower production values and how they have no idea how to make a sort of creepy/unsettling experimental haunted video. The killer videotape is only about 15 seconds of Japanese letters, a blinking eyeball, and a man with a napkin over his head. None of the freaky effects that made it look unnatural in the American version is present; it just looks like normal footage someone shot with a cheap 16mm camera. And that's how the rest of the movie is shot: normal. The whole dim and green flourescent look of The Ring got on my nerves at times, but I guess it helped establish some sort of mood because Ringu is shot entirely in bright, warm light that kills any attempts at horror. It feels even more like an (Asian) episode of "Murder, She Wrote" with no supernatural feeling elements at all. Sure The Ring was a lame mystery interspaced with quick flashes of crawling maggots, but at least that was something. The closest Ringu gets to breaking away from an Angela Lansbury show is freezing the frame and fading to photo negative colors whenever someone gets killed. I'll take the maggots, thank you. Speaking of the death, I guess the Japanese film industry doesn't believe in special effects makeup, because they can't be bothered with making dead people look dead. The bodies in The Ring were decomposed heaps, Ringu just has the actors curl up with a goofy frozen look of shock on their faces. A dead body shouldn't make me laugh (okay, theoretically). The drowned girl that comes out of the TV (which came as a surprise to no one with it being the ONE scene people remembered from the commercials and trailers) has colorful, healthy looking skin; they couldn't even bother to slap on some goth pancake makeup to make her actually look like a drowning victim. So in the end, if you turn down the brightness on your TV (and all the actors wore sunglasses and spoke English), you'd be hard pressed to tell the two versions apart, except when it came time to show something scarey, in which case the goold 'ole U.S.A wins by a narrow margin through its superior makeup and experimental film technology.[/quote]