One Missed Pod has finished with the Ring-A-Palooza but the Ring-A-Palooza hasn’t finished with One Missed Pod. The Ring-A-Palooza led to burnout on Ring movies, haunted VHS’, and supernatural mysteries that will require time to nurse and heal. Rather than subjecting you to another hour of Sadako-speak, One Missed Pod is launching its written content looking back at the Ring-A-Palooza. Articles in this column will range from directly related to episodes of the podcast to detached from the podcast but related to Japanese horror, so if you’re a fan of J-Horror then you’ll want to keep your eyes peeled for new articles.
Zack: Talk about a painful experience. I have always leaned more towards the Ju-On films than I have the Ring series and this watch through has only further defined the separation between these two series. The Ring films present a mystery but one that you have no chance of answering; the clues are esoteric and the answers are kept out of the frame. Yet these films, with the exception of Ring 0, retrace their steps again and again so often that we can’t help but grow bored of the repetition, get ahead of the mystery, and snooze when we should be afraid.
Perhaps no example highlights this better than Ring Virus (1999). This South Korean remake of Ring (1998) literally retraces familiar ground but never adds anything to the discussion, like Gore Verbinski did with his American remake. The film feels tired and pointless already, only coming a year after the Japanese original; a remake purely to expose the film to a wider audience and earn a profit rather than an insightful exercise of a creative spirit.
But I lied when I called it the original. The original film is Ring: Kanzenban (1995) and I frankly found this film to be the most interesting of all that we watched during this Ring-A-Palooza. Is it the best film? No. Is it a particularly good film? It’s ‘ight, I guess. It is definitely problematic, which I expect that Kelly has spoken about below in more grace than I could. No, what I find most interesting about Ring: Kanzenban is the way that it helps to highlight the many threads of the Ring virus that connect the original source novel, Japanese and American films together.
Ring: Kanzenban was the first adaptation of the novel Ring and it is also the most accurate. Instead of the story of a mother fighting for her and her child’s life, the story focuses on two male characters. The supernatural imposes itself into the narrative briefly but it is truly the world of medical science in which the horrors emerge. The nature of Sadako, the videotape, and the virus are all worlds apart from what we have come to know and expect from the series. But the origin in medical science explains the focus on such that comes from Ring 2 (1999); the lead’s gender was swapped to create a narrative focusing on motherhood which was then continued in the rest of the incarnations (except for Ring 0) and it even goes a long way towards explaining the awful Rasen (1998).
Furthermore, the film was among the most interesting for being a softcore adaptation of the material that was shot on video. SOV isn’t a label that appeals to many people yet the cinematography on display here was amazing. Sadako appears often as a semi-nude temptress of the supernatural in a manner similar to the film Lifeforce (1985); the erotic potential of Ring: Kanzenban is incredible, which only makes it all the more disappointing that it fumbles the ball. The intersex element which is discussed more below is, frankly, irrelevant to the story and only contributes to diminish the film as a whole. I want to recommend it but more so for the film that I see in it, the potential it demonstrates. If we’re lucky then perhaps someone will see that potential and exploit in a more fully realized and effective manner without the harmful elements.
As for the Ring-A-Paloooza itself. I think it was a success. If a palooza is an exaggerated event then I can’t think of a more fitting term for the madness that we drove ourselves through in this condensed series viewing. I don’t recommend it for the faint of heart; I don’t recommend it for the strong of heart either.
Guess I just don’t recommend it. Take the series slower, enjoy them one at a time, and spread out. You’ll have a much better experience.
Kelly: Legit, I think the Ring-A-Palooza drove us a little mad. One day we may look back and think, what a fun experience that was! But nah. It was a little much. It’s one thing to watch an entire series from start to finish (and if you consider the Sadako sequels that came later, you could argue that we didn’t even do that!), but it’s quite another to watch all the remakes and erased movies, too. It is like rewatching the same story again and again. When we got to Hollywood’s much-maligned The Ring Two, we were giving it extra points for at least being something totally different.
There was to be one more episode of Ring-A-Palooza for the podcast, focusing on Ring: Kanzenban, the softcore made-for-Japanese-TV film that came out before all the others, as well as The Ring Virus, the South Korean remake of the original story. And we just ran out of steam. Though it was attractive to be one of the few English speaking commentators on two films that are largely unseen or overlooked in the West, ultimately I don’t think Zack had anything good to say about The Ring Virus and I had a major beef with Ring: Kanzenban.
Here’s my take on The Ring Virus: eh, it’s okay. I saw it once before with a group of friends one Halloween and liked it much more then. Of course, that time it’d been many years between viewings of any Ring movies, and I was able to appreciate revisiting the same supernatural mystery with a different style and cast (Doona Bae!!!). Watching it at the tail end of the Ring-A-Palooza made me… bored. It’s not a bad movie! I give it a totally passable 3 out of 5 stars. But oh my God, don’t do as we have done and watch it after watching Ring, Ring 2, Rasen, Ring 0, The Ring, Rings, The Ring Two, and Ring: Kanzenban. It’s one of those cases where I don’t know how much to hold against the movie and how much to hold against us for the manner in which we decided to watch the film(s).
I do not like Ring: Kanzenban.
So, the term ‘kanzenban’, as I understand it, means ‘complete’ or something to that effect. And this is the truest to the source material by novelist Koji Suzuki. It treats the curse as a virus (which, obviously, The Ring Virus does, too. And this sort of understanding of the curse is also prevalent in Spiral/Rasen). And instead of a female reporter, as in every other adaptation from Japan, to Korea, to America, this one keeps the book’s male lead. And instead of the ex-husband supporting character who ultimately meets his doom, we have another dude who’s a doctor friend to our lead (Yoshio Harada, a favorite of mine, steps into that Hiroyuki Sanada role here).
What’s interesting is that though the lead keeps his gender the same as the book, Kanzenban strips him of his fatherhood. He’s simply a father-to-be here. Why this is interesting to me is that it removes the threat of the curse on the living child. But what’s more, it removes our chance to observe how the film depicts him as a father. The Ring movies have been written about as narratives of neglectful mothers. I personally never saw Nanako Matsushima’s Reiko or Naomi Watts’ Rachel that way. But I get where people are coming from. And even Hollywood’s Ring Two plays with the neglectful mother role as protective services try to take Rachel’s kid away from her mid-film. What I had wished to observe was whether, when the same drama and choices are made by a male character, will we still see him as a neglectful father? But removing the kid from the story kinda eliminates our chance to know.
Kanzenban and The Ring Virus both have the least frightening version of the cursed tapes, complete with a grandma speaking in some indecipherable dialect at one point. I’m not sure that Kanzenban is ever scary. It’s occasionally interesting because it is wildly different, very trashy (I was unprepared for how much naked Sadako the movie would give us), and ultimately aggravating and insulting. But scary? Not to me. When Sadako comes to kill people in Kanzenban, gone are the visual flourishes we’ve associated with the ghost’s arrival that made the character so iconic. With all the positive changes made in the 1998 Ring, I’m kinda forced to conclude that Hideo Nakata is who is most responsible for making Ring the longlasting hit that it’s become, and that Suzuki was lucky to have his book adapted by such a fine director.
One thing that both The Ring Virus and Kanzenban keep from the Suzuki book is that Sadako is intersex. I believe she’s referred to as ‘both man and woman’ in The Ring Virus and it really doesn’t go any farther than that. In Kanzenban, the fact that she has male reproductive organs is actually what gets her killed in a gay panic scene as a rapey Tomorowo Taguchi character feels between her legs and freaks out. Sadako gets mad in return and starts cursing him. He then attacks her and dumps her in the well.
I love horror but horror does not always love the LGBTQ community back. And the movie’s decision to put a queer panic murder into the middle of its narrative knocked me out of the story and I never really found my way back on board with it. Can’t be helped, I’m human and I bring my experiences with me to movies, too. And it’s here that I come back to how I think Hideo Nakata deserves all the credit in the world for making this trashy story into an international phenomenon with his later adaptation. I do not like Ring: Kanzenban.
Interesting note: George Iida wrote the screenplay for Ring: Kanzenban. In a way, Iida’s Spiral/Rasen seems like a more true sequel to Kanzenban than it does to Nakata’s Ring.
One of the things I always meant to mention in one of the episodes but never remembered/found the right time to do so, was my admiration for the way in which the curse is lifted from our hero in like the 1st or 2nd act but they don’t realize it and neither do we. The creation of and then sharing of a VHS copy is passed off so casually early in the film that we do not understand its significance until too late. But by then, we’ve solved the mystery, found bones at the bottom of a well, and think we’ve appeased the ghost! But the ghost was never to be appeased. She just wanted to spread her hurt. And only by being an accomplice to that aim could you survive her. I like that. And I like that basically every adaptation keeps that concept intact. I’ve seen ’em all, so I know that twist is coming, but I still admire how casually it’s performed.
What are my final thoughts on the Ring series? These are good movies. Well. Most of them are. Also: don’t watch them back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-infinity. It kills some of the fun. Nakata’s Ring and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring are my favorites of them all, with Norio Tsuruta’s Ring 0 ranking comfortably in 3rd.
I come back to something I think I said in one of the episodes, which is that these movies became so much a part of pop culture in the 2000s that they stopped being seen as what they are; good horror movies. In the time since, the movies have kinda strangely become underrated and underseen, like they are in need of reevaluation. I hope that we helped provide some of that reevaluation.
