In a Nutshell
An "unusual" video tape appears. Whoever watches it ends up dead in exactly one week. Several people watch said video tape. Some end up dead (surprise!) while the other race against time to find a solution to their little problem.

Japanese, Korean, American...
In 1998, the Japanese film The Ring (based on a book by Kôji Suzuki) was released. Director Hideo Nakata brought to life a wonderfully original horror story that others would soon want to re-envision.

By most accounts, it seems that Korean director Dong-bin Kim's 1999 remake, titled The Ring Virus, has an equal amount of positive internet buzz as the now classic original. And come October 18, 2002, we shall see the U.S. version re-re-evisioned by Gore Verbinski. (Whoa... the first remake was only a year later and the second three years after that? It took 41 years to remake Ocean's Eleven!)

Style and Story
It's not every day that a movie get such recognition that it's remade in multiple countries. An elegantly written story, The Ring has style in both plot and cinematography, things often lacking in a many films (particularly in the horror genre).

For instance, immediately after finishing the Japanese The Ring DVD, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars came on HBO (or some other cable movie station). It was simply an astonishing contrast to go from seeing a really creepy flick with very little gore and on-screen violence to a movie that had literally nothing but gore and violence (not to mention bad acting and a bad plot).

Less is sometimes more à la Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene. And similarly to the story development of The Sixth Sense and The Others, The Ring strings you along, giving you brief glimpses of details until the whole picture is complete at the very end. (And might I add, that the end was DAMN CREEPY!)

Cross-Cultural
While The Ring is unique horror film, many of the traditional horror movie attributes are present. I would like to refer to these attributes as "Cross-Cultural Horror Movie Character Stupidity," or Croculhomocharstup for short. Croculhomocharstups are often things like going outside alone at night when you know a macheted killer awaits or checking the assumedly "dead" monster for signs of life or staying inside a haunted house which oozes blood from the walls and quite plainly states "GET OUT!"

There are several Croculhomocharstups present in this flick. But they are fairly excusable in the grand scheme of things.

On the web: The Ring DVD