Harefooted Halloween: Sadako 3D

What I Liked: The pulpy look and feel to the whole thing is kinda cool actually.  It’s fairly comic booky with bright colors and some over the top looking creatures towards the end.  I’ll give it points for style.  I mean this ain’t Drive or A Clockwork Orange or nothin’ but the filmmakers were definitely going for a look and I think they pulled it off for the most part.  

What I Didn’t Like: Boy did they dumb the Ringu concept way down.  The story is built up to be more than a revenge tale, or even a murder tale.  They tried to have a more comic book type story to go with the look but it doesn’t work.

They rub that 3D shit in your face pretty hard with a bunch of crap (mostly glass) flying at the screen every so often.  Admittedly I think that stuff is kinda funny because of how blatant it is but really it’s not something you should play up so much in your movie (even your 3D movie).

Overall Impression: Kids these days have no idea what a video tape is so I’m all for updating the Ringu format to fit modern technology.  Replacing the tape with a cursed YouTube video is totally fitting and downright hilarious.  You can’t tell me that that doesn’t sound like a Scary Movie spoof or some shit.

But at the same time I sorta dug the cheesy and, sometimes, wacky approach the filmmakers took.  They throw in fresh ideas like Sadako uses her hair as a weapon to grab ahold of people and the protagonist can use her scream to shatter and destroy enemies. 

And then there are the fucking bizarre Sadako bug-like creatures that attack in droves.  They have the usual hair, arms and coloration but they also have these huge long back legs and no eyes or nose.  I especially liked how the head came out with the gnarly mouth.

With so many changes to the original Ringu idea this was probably a totally different script until someone noticed the similarities and decided to make it a rebootquel. 

Make no mistake, they’re appealing to the lowest common denominator here (well, the Japanese lowest common denominator which may or may not be higher than the American one).  But I kinda liked it.  Not a lot, but it was an interesting twist on a Ring installment.  It’s almost like a Grindhouse Ring movie.