Normally this is the kind of butchery that would have most sane film lovers up in arms, but the results are actually astonishingly good. The reason for this lies in both the quality of the original material and the care and attention that Houston lavished on the project. Whilst cut to make the film as exciting as possible, it retains the series’ emotional core, that of the fully-rounded but understated relationship between the ronin Itto and his three-year old son Daigoro. Similarly, the dubbing is some of the most effective I’ve ever seen on a foreign language movie; Houston apparently enlisted the help of lip-readers to assist him with the script, meaning that occasionally the English dialogue genuinely seems to be spoken by the Japanese actors. And the new music score is a blinder – perhaps anachronistic or inappropriate for the setting, but the humming synths and ambient washes interact well with the hyper-stylised visuals.

It is, however, Kenji Misumi’s original direction that is the star here. The episodic, Western-esque narrative simply demands that Itto fights off different sets of ninjas sent by the eponymous Shogun (who ordered the murder of Itto and his wife) in a variety of locations. This results in some of the most eye-poppingly enjoyable swordplay and bloodshed I’ve ever seen in a film; Misumi continually surprises with new ways of severing limbs, heads and other body parts, and the make-up department really go to town with some of the reddest blood I’ve seen outside of an Italian movie. The backdrops are stupendous as well, with each confrontation taking place in a setting more dazzling than the last; the epic climax sees Itto take on an entire army atop a desert dune, no less. There’s a tremendous sense of fun here, as well; Daigoro’s customised babycart, which allows him to see of a few ninjas himself, is a terrific touch, and the clan of female assassins are great villains.

Anchoring the film are two knockout performances from Tomisaburo Wakayama as Itto and Akihiro Tomikawa as Daigoro. Wakayama economically but subtly conveys both sadness and rage at the fugitive lifestyle he is forced to lead and the deep love for his son, whilst Tomikawa delivers one of the best performances I’ve seen from a child actor in a long time; if you’re left untouched by the scene where Daigoro gathers water from a river to revive an unconscious Itto, you’re a colder person than me. Whilst Houston’s primary interest is in the action, he retains enough character moments like this to allow a depth and warmth to permeate the gore, adding a couple of much needed respites to the frenzied action elsewhere.

Shogun Assassin would go on to cast a long shadow over many subsequent martial arts movies; in particular, it found renewed currency when Quentin Tarantino declared it the primary inspiration behind Kill Bill. Whilst the original Lone Wolf & Cub films probably more fully realised as pieces of film-making, this doesn’t stop Shogun Assassin being both a terrific genre piece and a hugely enjoyable piece of cinema in its own right. By turns touching, tense, beautiful and enormously exciting, it stands alone as possibly one of the unlikeliest artistic triumphs of the grindhouse era.

Understanding the latter point is perhaps crucial for getting in the right headspace to appreciate Zatoichi. The film, while hugely enjoyable and masterfully executed, is a very mainstream proposition. In the UK it is available on the none-more-arthouse label Artificial Eye, which may lead one to expect a more ‘alternative’ offering; those who expect such a film may be surprised by the relatively straightforward plotting, broad slapstick comedy interludes and the fourth-wall shattering Bollywood-style song and dance number that closes the film.

Ultimately, Kitano’s Zatoichi is an attractive, accessible, reverential repackaging of a well-loved character that may well be low on insight or subtlety but rates high on excitement and pure cinematic pleasure. The plot will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Western; Zatoichi arrives in an otherwise peaceful small town that is terrorised by a violent gang, and he promptly sets about seeing them off. Along the way, he befriends a local farmer and her gambling-addict son, assists two geishas seeking to avenge the murder of their family, and duels with Gennosuke, a powerful ronin who may well match him for sword skills.

The film looks ravishing, with the various locales rendered beautifully and a unified sense of location in the town. But really the headline attractions here are Kitano as Zatoichi, and the swordplay, and both are first rate. Kitano marks out Zatoichi’s fighting skills as being devastatingly precise rather than showy, contrasted well with the more lavish displays by other characters. In particular, Zatoichi’s showdowns with the various yakuzas towards the end of the film are hugely exciting and well-realised. Only the much-anticipated duel between Zatoichi and Gennosuke disappoints, feeling thrown away and anti-climactic.

In keeping with the humble nature of his character, Kitano’s performance is admirably restrained, yet he carries enough presence to anchor the whole film. The rest of the characters are appealingly drawn, with enough detail to flesh them out without bogging the film down with backstories. In particular, Gennosuke’s fleeting distaste for what his work forces him to do is a nice touch, while the gang bosses are pleasingly repugnant. The geisha storyline perhaps engages less because the ‘twist’ is fairly well signposted, but it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Dance troupe The Stripes, whose performance closes the film, appear earlier in a number of entertaining slapstick cameos where they show off their skills whilst posing as farmers and builders.

If there’s one criticism to be had of Zatoichi, it’s that ultimately the film feels fairly inconsequential; whilst it’s a hugely enjoyable way to pass two hours, there’s not a much that lingers with the viewer afterwards other than the sense of having had a lot of fun. Really though, it feels rather mean spirited to hold this against the film. Zatoichi is a terrific piece of work that goes full-throttle in delivering a solidly entertaining mainstream experience. I loved it, and if you’re in the mood for a slice of pure cinematic pleasure, I wager you will too.

When The Eye, the second film jointly directed by Hong Kong’s Pang Brothers, emerged in 2002, it was released into a very different climate to their 1999 debut, Bangkok Dangerous; US studios were hungry for Asian properties that would play well in the West, and to some degree the Pangs seem happy to meet this demand. Essentially, the main problem with The Eye is the nagging sense that it’s continually got one eye (ho ho) on the international market, and as a result the rather promising storyline feels unnecessarily reined in and hampered by the fairly conventional execution.

The plot comes on like an extended episode of Tales of the Unexpected, telling the story of a young violinist who, blinded since childhood, is given an transplant to rescue her sight only to be plagued by terrifying visions courtesy of the mysterious donor. It’s not an unfamiliar setup, but it has the tantalising potential to deliver some truly perspective-bending, disturbing visual madness; sadly the Pangs opt to deliver their scares through a series of wholly conventional, Westernised jumps and crashing noises rather than delving too deeply into Mun’s relative isolation and inner world. It seems fairly clear from the outset to the audience what’s going on here, and so the mystery becomes more focused on Mun and Dr Wah’s investigations into the donor; but sadly this thread falls flat by offering very little in the way of intrigue. The duo’s investigations manage to hit the right track straight off the bat, and from then on it’s a very easy and unchallenging ride to the resolution. The lack of twists or tonal modulation is wholly surprising, and what should be set-piece visual moments – the donor’s world bleeding in and out of Mun’s – are handled without flair, like a poor man’s David Lynch.

That’s not to say that there’s nothing to enjoy here. The Eye is unoriginal, but it’s a slick enough piece of work, with a well-paced story and a sympathetic treatment of its characters by both the Pangs and the cast. Angelica Lee acquits herself fairly well as Mun, and even though Dr Wah comes across as being slightly too credulous for a member of the medical profession, Laurence Chou makes him likeable enough. The film also successfully pulls off an audacious twist an hour through which is beautifully trailed and genuinely had me kicking myself for not getting there sooner. However, much of the disappointment of the film stems from the climax. The Pangs attempt a Ringu-style double ending, which falls flat for two reasons; primarily, the supposed ‘first’ resolution is so low-key as to barely register, while the coda promises spectacle but actually ends up limp and uncinematic. Hideo Nakata’s film succeeded by following a nerve-shredding climax with a moment that managed to top it for nail-biting innovation, but in following a tedious resolve with a botched Hollywood-style blow-out, the Pangs ensure their film end on more of a whimper than a bang.

All of which is not to say I didn’t find The Eye enjoyable enough; it’s undemanding fare that passes 100 minutes pleasantly enough, and as I said earlier, it does have that twist at the sixty minute mark. Unfortunately, it could – and should – have been much more than that. The Pangs clearly have an eye for a story and an undeniable ability behind the lens; if they had let themselves off the leash a little and delved more into the nightmare world they describe this could have been a film to rank alongside the wave of Asian horrors that broke a couple of years earlier. Ultimately, The Eye isn’t nearly disturbing nor – frankly – gory enough to either serve the story it wants to tell nor to differentiate itself from the NC-17 rated mush that’s marked Hollywood’s recent output. Ironically, The Eye is an Asian horror that tries too hard to satisfy foreign notions of what Asian horror is. Given that the film has been re-made in both India and the US, the Pangs have played the market and won, but at the cost of the x-factor that had American execs looking East in the first place.

In many ways, the film shares traits with David Fincher’s Zodiac, released four later. Both follow serial murders that remain unresolved to this day, and this immediately creates a challenge: how do you present a rounded narrative when the story you are telling remains fundamentally unfinished? Both Bong and Fincher tackle this by making the details of the killings secondary to the effects of the investigations on those involved. Memories of Murder tells the story of rural detective Park Doo-man, who is forced to work with Seoul detective Seo Tae-yoon in solving the murders of local woman who are found raped and murdered near a field on rainy nights.

What impressed me most about The Host was its humanity, and this is even more true of Memories of Murder. Culture-clash detective stories are nothing new, but Bong’s dazzling characterisation really brings to life the awkward partnership of Park and Seo. Most impressive is the way he uses humour in unlikely circumstances to bring an extra layer of empathy to the characters; there’s nothing particularly funny about either the killings themselves or the brutal ways in which Park and his colleagues try to pin them on a string of “best fit” local weirdos (which will feel particularly resonant for UK viewers following recent acquittal of Barry George), but the exasperated desperation of the police is bravely played partly for laughs, as they scrabble around without leads, resources or procedure. In particular, the opening sequence at the scene of the crime is hilarious, as Park attempts to co-ordinate the investigation amidst chaos that borders on slapstick. Bong’s use of comedy strikes just the right tone; it’s irreverent without ever feeling tasteless or gratuitous, and humanises a cast of characters that might otherwise be simply inept or even thuggish.

Amidst the laughs, though, is a very trenchant look at the effect an unresolved crime can have on those tasked with delivering justice. Park and Seo are both changed across the course of the film by their involvement with the case and with each other. Park’s development is the more positive of the two, learning to respect the thorough practices and deductive techniques of his more urbane partner; an epilogue, set more than a decade later, shows him to be older and wiser in a nice modulation of Song Kang-Ho’s outstanding performance. Seo, on the other hand, reverts to brutality when his urban instincts fail to solve the crime; the sequence where he beats a promising but inconclusive suspect by a railway tunnel is particularly chilling. But what pervades the film most is a sense of isolation, that these are two men who have nowhere else to turn in order to stop the murderer from killing again. As with The Host, there’s an implicit criticism of the South Korean government here, made clear in the scene where Park and Seo appeal for backup only to be told that everyone’s busy suppressing a demonstration. And although the magnitude of the murders is clear, Bong remains tight in his focus, giving little indication of how the rest of the country is responding (Seoul feels like it might as well be on another continent) and thereby increasing the burden placed on the two detectives.

Unlike Fincher, Bong presents suspects but never points the finger or presents his own theories as to who the real killer is; as a result, the movie offers less closure to the viewer than Zodiac. The ending is understated but completely devastating, bringing Park full circle (literally) and leaving him a changed man, in some ways bettered but in other ways scarred by his involvement. By dint of its subject matter the film offers more questions than it answers, but such is Bong’s skill that it feels both complete and infuriatingly open in equal measure. Memories of Murder is an incredible film that lingers in the mind long after the credits have finished, a confident and assured statement from a directing talent on the rise.

On paper, you could be forgiven for thinking that you probably had seen it already, as many of the elements that would define the series are present and correct from the start – a man in a rubber monster suit smashing up miniature replicas of Tokyo, the anti-nuclear subtext, hundreds of Japanese people screaming in panic… But whilst subsequent Godzilla films have their moments, they’re a world away from the heart and soul that you’ll find in the very first film. There is absolutely nothing camp about this movie; instead it’s a stately, emotional and at times even harrowing film that treats its subject matter thoughtfully and with gravitas.

Godzilla is of course an ancient monster woken up after millions of years and given terrifying powers by the Japanese H-bomb tests. Obviously, this puts the theme of nuclear weaponry front and centre in the film, but to describe it as simply an anti-nuclear polemic is an over simplification. Godzilla is far more multilayered than many subsequent horror and sci-fi movies that use a simplistic environmental warning as a narrative rationale for monsters and zombies; instead, director Ishiro Honda’s triumph is the way he rejects upfront preaching for a sophisticated threading of ideas throughout the film. Godzilla indeed represents the destructive power of the atomic bomb both on a literal and an allegorical level; however, Serizawa’s dilemma over the deployment of his Oxygen Destroyer (which occupies most of the second half of the film and is written off too easily by many critics as a simple plot device) reflects the wider issues surrounding the ethics of atomic power: should a discovery be suppressed if there are many ‘bad’ applications for it above and beyond its immediate advantages? And once a discovery has been made, can there ever be any turning back? That the Oxygen Destroyer ultimately saves the day, despite being an even more destructive superweapon than those lamented in the film, suggests a thoughtful ambivalence about the nuclear issue, rather than the soapbox grandstanding of lesser directors.

But as well as brains, the film has a very human heart to it as well. Honda deliberately resonates with recent events that would sit very heavily in the Japanese national memory; characters discuss openly the horror of nuclear warfare that hit the country only nine years previously, and the opening scene on the boat is uncomfortably close to the Castle Bravo test earlier in 1954, where the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was poisoned by the fallout from American nuclear testing. These are scars that run deep, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the scenes surrounding Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo. Subsequent films shied away from showing the human cost of the monster’s rampages but here it is in full force: orphaned children in hospitals sending Geiger counters into overload; a hysterical mother sitting with her two babies on her doorstep shouting that they’ll all be joining their dead father soon; schools of children praying for an end to the onslaught. It’s sobering, harrowing stuff, made all the more emotional by the dispassionate way Honda’s camera simply records the events as they unfold.

Crucially, the effects – although creaky by modern standards – don’t let the side down. This is partly helped by the noir-ish black and white look of the film, where most of the monster action takes place at night, but equally it’s hard not to be impressed by just how well Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo is realised. Unlike the friendly green dinosaur he would later become, here the monster is a dark, brutish killing machine who towers over the city with ominous force. Helpfully, the actors play it for real as well with no mugging to the camera, and it’s hard not to find at least some pathos in the central love triange of Serizawa, Ogata and Emiko.

Honda and his team made plain their debt to King Kong nearly twenty years earlier, and whilst that film may have been the first to successfully realise the concept of a huge creature running rampage in a major city, to my mind Godzilla remains the finest giant monster movie ever made. The spectacle we expect from such a film is there if that’s what you’re looking for, but almost uniquely for the genre, it is overshadowed by the concepts, ideas and genuine emotion. In subsequent films we root for the monster and cheer when he knocks down another skyscraper, but here Honda successfully conveys the sheer terror of living through such an unstoppable onslaught. Godzilla is never preachy or presumptive in its nuclear subtext, but instead offers a harrowing and heartfelt yelp of pain from a culture that had all too recently suffered the worst destruction that science could then concoct.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the film is how dated it looks and feels. In plot and atmosphere, it is virtually indistinguishable from an early-80s Bruno Mattei splatter epic, to the extent that we had to keep reminding ourselves it was made in the last decade. The plot, such as it is, is almost identical to the lamentable Zombie Flesheaters 2 – as well as about a million other spaghetti horrors – concerning a virus outbreak from a military lab that turns people into flesh-hungry monsters. There’s an attempt made to address modern gender roles by making both the lead zombie and the central protagonist ass-kicking women, but like many of the film’s lame ‘character moments’ it feels contrived (at best) and patronising (at worst).

But then this is a zombie flick, a genre hardly noted for being cerebral. Generally, the worst crime a film like this can commit is to be boring, and unfortunately Junk fails on this count too; the limitations of the budget (encapsulated by the duller-than-dull warehouse setting) mean that the set-piece showdowns are considerably less exciting than they should be. Like every second-rate action film of the era, Junk aims for Matrix-style kinetic thrills, and fails dismally; no amount of clever editing and propulsive drum machines on the soundtrack can disguise the fact that Muroga shoots everything in a medium-close, 3/4 frame shot in order to disguise the pitiful location and lack of extras. Even the zombies – probably the cheapest screen monsters to realise – are rubbish, with the decay of living death represented by a handful of mud slapped on the face.

In fact, probably the most entertaining thing about the film is Yuki Kashimoto’s rather unfortunate performance as the doctor at the centre of the story. Forced to deliver half his lines in English by a ham-fisted script that uses token American characters to make the film seem more international, his slurred mangling of the language is unintentionally hilarious and suggests that Muroga wasn’t too bothered bm the international market. I can return the favour and suggest that the international market shouldn’t be too bothered by Junk. There are better zombie films out there, and there are definitely better Japanese films out there. Unless you have a yearning nostalgia for Italian zombie films, you’re best to give this one a miss. Junk by name, and unfortunately, Junk by nature.

I can only assume that the Grudge hype is born more out of the fact that it’s a spooky Japanese horror film rather than anything to do with the film itself. It’s got quite a clever twist; it’s a haunted house movie, but if you come into contact with the house, the ghosts can get you anywhere, even after you’ve left the building. The film is almost an anthology movie, telling the various, intertwining stories of people who become involved in the house (the scene of several nasty murders), from a volunteer social worker to the policemen investigating the strange goings on. I’m all for a non-linear narrative, but the one that director Shimizu Takashi employs here hinders rather than helps the story. The movie is divided into segments each telling the story of a different character, and so the film’s time frame shifts all over the place; unfortunately, the characters are not really interesting enough to warrant this exclusive treatment, and in some cases are utterly interchangeable. It might have been more worthwhile to show us perhaps a day / week / month in the house and all the various comings and goings in that time, as at least it could have lent the film some Ring-style ‘race against time’ pacing; instead, the confusing timeframe saps any energy out of the story, dragging it down.

Even worse, it all looks so sterile. At least when you watch a Vincent Price haunted house movie you get some impressive interiors, but the Grudge house is just painfully dull to watch, with some of the most pedestrian lighting I’ve ever seen. The ghosts add some momentary excitement, but even they are sloppily inconsistent: in the shadows, in full view, going down corridors, passing through walls… Maybe it’s meant to be enigmatic but it feels sloppily thought out. The Grudge may be many things, but it’s not a strong enough film to support an international franchise. The Ring saga may have been milked to death, but at least it had a knockout origin – this doesn’t. And like Hideo Nakata, Shimizu Takashi is starting to look like a one-trick pony; he’s helmed (in various capacities) all the incarnations of this film so far, and precious little else. The Grudge has had premier league status conferred upon it, but it doesn’t feel like the start of a phenomenon – it’s just dull.

Kirie Goshima is an ordinary school girl living in the small town of Kurozucho. She’s confused over whether her relationship with childhood friend Suichi Saito is a romantic one or not, but Suichi’s distracted by concerns of his own. His father has driven himself mad looking at spirals, filming snails and looking at pottery for hours on end. Suichi thinks that spirals could well end up dooming the town, and events start to confirm this: a boy at Kirie’s school throws himself down a huge spiral staircase and dies with a smile on his face, while another boy seems to be turning into a snail. As the body-count rises, events get more nightmarish, and it soon becomes apparent that Suichi and Kirie need to flee Kurozucho before the whole town spirals away…

The debut feature by music video director Higuchinsky, and based on an incredibly popular Manga series, Uzumaki’s probably a film of selected appeal. I was tempted to look for allegory or meaning, but there isn’t any – the spirals, quite literally, are the threat, and it’s unclear what causes them or what they are. For the first half hour, I was unsure where the film was going; it shares the same eccentric, small-town atmosphere as a lot of Jeunet and Carot films, especially Delicatessen, but I didn’t find the characters of Kirie and Suichi particularly compelling or sympathetic. That the film is a success is down to Higuchinsky’s astonishing use of the imagery; spirals gradually saturate every part of the movie, objects and people, and when the camera starts to spiral round its subjects as well, the film takes on an utterly oppressive nightmare quality. By the end, you’re rooting for the two main characters simply because they’re our only anchors of normality as everything else falls apart.

My other concern at the start was that the film wouldn’t pack any emotional punch, but this too proved to be unfounded. As Kirie, Ericko Hitsune’s range isn’t that impressive, and excess emotion isn’t really her forte, but she’s helped by the material; although the spiral threat is surreal and intangible, its consequences are real – as the array of blood-spattered bodies testify. Suichi’s mother is hospitalised because of her fear of spirals, and this leads to several shocking scenes, including one where she cuts off the tips of her fingers so she doesn’t have to look at her spiralling fingerprints. Kirie’s reactions to events are understandable – she hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, nor the faintest idea what to do or how to help Suichi deal with his imploding family. This desperation provides the film’s human heart. Equally, the twee photo album scene early in the film is redeemed by the gradual overloading of spiral images later on; compared to what follows, the flickery scenes of children playing feel refreshingly ‘clean’.

Uzumaki also shares Delicatessen’s grotesque sense of humour, mixing the witty with the disturbing. Suichi’s father’s horrific death (spinning around in a top-loading washing machine) is probably the best example, but the snail scenes are great as well: Kirie and her friends only notice there is something wrong with one of their classmates when he starts walking increasingly slowly, only comes to school when it rains and is covered in a thick layer of slime. Later, as more kids are transformed, one boy is seen circling answers on a multiple-choice exam paper with increasingly spiral-like markings whiles drinking bottle after bottle of water. The final scenes, as the completely-transformed boys crawl up the sides of the school while the girls coo at how pretty their shells are, are incredible. Uzumaki’s extreme surrealism may offer little emotional resonance, but its shocking images and human sense of desperation mean that once the spiral attack is underway, it’s never just a sterile exercise in visuals. Baffling, beautiful and disturbing, it offers no answers and poses even fewer questions, but rewards adventurous viewers by lingering in the memory after the spiralling closing credits have rolled.

Where do you begin with this mess of a film? Primarily, there’s the sense that Nakata and screenwriter Ehren Kruger are making it up as they go along, so listlessly do they pick at imagery and plot points from the previous film(s) before carelessly tossing in new elements. The original was driven by the race against time to solve Samara’s curse before Aidan died; without that countdown, the plot’s almost completely freeform, with Aidan (now apparently channelling Samara) acting as a magnet for all sorts of supernatural phenomena. Cue a CGI deer attack (that’s right) which seems to come from nowhere and head the same way. Frustratingly, this also pushes David Dorfman’s utterly irritating Aidan to centre stage, effectively making this yet another spooky kid movie. Aidan falls ill and is hospitalised, and his mother Rachel is suspected of abuse, until Aidan manages to make his doctor kill herself (in one of the film’s few genuinely shocking moments).

Rachel then decides that Samara’s curse lives on simply because… she just wants a mother who’ll love her. At this point, the movie abandons the Ring story altogether and becomes a complete re-tread of Nakata’s own Dark Water (recently remade in the States… are you confused yet?), complete with spooky running taps and water that won’t behave as it should. Totally illogical, and utterly lazy, Nakata may as well have stepped in front of the camera at this point and apologised for having completely run out of ideas. Anyway, Rachel somehow then finds herself ‘within’ the deadly videotape, complete with pointlessly 2-D surroundings and scanlines, and decides that actually Samara doesn’t want to be loved; she then dispatches her down the well with a single line that brings what remains of the film’s credibility crashing down around its ears. Job done.

Having nailed my colours to the mast as being a devotee of the original film, this film made me reassess my view of Nakata’s work. I still think the original Ring is a visionary, ground-breaking piece, but I’m not so sure about what he’s done since; Dark Water is a great film but very similar to Ring (both in story and style), and the Japanese Ring 2 offered up a reasonably compelling remix of the first film. Ring Two was always going to be a make or break film, and unfortunately he proves himself to be a one trick pony, doomed to retell the same story with diminishing returns (if you include Dark Water, this is the fourth time he’s done it). His boredom is reflected on the screen, and save for a few moments of excitement, is likely to be shared by his audience. Gore Verbinski’s film is way better than this; whether The Ring Two has killed the franchise remains to be seen, but if we get a Ring Three, then some fresh blood is desperately needed.

Although it’s easy to be cynical about US cinema’s current love-in with the the Japanese, Ring’s release did at least help commercial Western horror cinema back out of a rather nasty cul-de-sac. By the late 90s, genuinely well-crafted scares had given way either to the sneering irony of the Scream series or gimmicky, sub-Blair Witch reality devices. Nakata’s film stuck out like a sore thumb, in that it has none of the jittery “oh, it was just a cat” shocks Western audiences had become accustomed to; instead, Ring is a very linear film with a rising sense of fear and dread that by the conclusion has reached nerve-shredding proportions. The ticking time-bomb of the seven day curse is the only dynamic needed to drive the plot along, without the need for artificial twists or shocks. The story, and Nakata’s gradual drip-feeding of information are enough.

This last part may seem quite strange considering I’ve already been quite critical of Suzuki’s original novels here, but as I hinted at before, Nakata’s probably the best editor that Suzuki’s ever had, powerfully exploiting everything the book got right (the imagery) and dropping everything the book got wrong (the silly pseudo-science). You probably don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that a story about a killer videotape is going to work better on the screen than in print, and Nakata’s dark, haunting representation of the tape’s contents (which is fairly faithful to Suzuki’s description) has added resonance for an audience watching the film in the same way Asakawa watches the video. Equally, the film’s most striking image (Sadako’s final attack on Takayama) was one of Nakata’s own creation, riffing on his source material in a way that defies any scientific explanation but is guaranteed to leave you open-mouthed. The junking of the novel’s science and rationale actually makes the film scarier in that it becomes impossible to for the characters to establish a fair playing field. In fact, the world of Ring is desperately unfair; the ending is logical but so devastatingly depressing that it hits you like a punch in the chest and stays with you long after the credits (and accompanying J-pop wailing) are over.

Outclassing any form of the story that preceded or followed it, Ring is a hypnotic thing of beauty. It’s not just a film, it’s a cultural moment, and its effects are felt ever more strongly. For first-timers or conoisseurs of the genre, this is essential.