The Ring Virus



Before the American remake of Ringu (1998) there was this Korean take on the same movie. Of the three I’d definitely say that The Ring Virus (1999) is the weakest film by far. It loses a lot of what made Ringu so creepy, while adding little to the scenario.

Like Ringu, The Ring Virus starts with a teenage girl dying mysteriously of what doctors say was a heart attack. The girl’s aunt Sun-joo is a reporter, and she does a little digging and finds out that three other teenagers died at the exact same time, and, like her niece, at least two of them were holding fistfuls of their own hair. Soo-jun finds out that one doctor present at the autopsy of two of the victims suggested that the deaths weren’t mere heart attacks.


This may be the worst blind date ever.

Sun-joo visits the doctor, Choi. He’s the kind of impossibly eccentric character who only appears in the movies. Sun-joo first finds him he’s laying on a mortuary slab with a blanket over himself, eating seeds. Despite having raised alarms during the autopsy, Choi refuses to give Sun-joo any help.

Sun-joo discovers that all four of the dead teens had stayed at certain resort the week before their deaths. She visits the resort, and finds a tape the teens watched. The Ring Virus drops the urban legend angle that Ringu had, so her leap to finding the videotape (or suspecting a videotape was involved at all) is nearly miraculous.


"...Send us all your money."

The tape is a series of strange images, though it’s less esoteric and far less creepy than in any other version of the story. The tape even includes helpful text explaining that anyone watching the tape will die in one week, and at the end there’s even text explaining how to break the curse… but these vital instructions have been taped over with a talk show!

Desperate to remove the curse Sun-joo tries to figure out what the images on the tape are about, and she pesters the cryptic Choi into helping her. Together they investigate, though frankly they aren’t very good at it. Eventually some visions lead them to the story of Eun-suh, a psychic girl who came to a bad end that probably wasn’t the least bit surprising to anybody who saw this movie.


Aaaahhh! Her hair is messy! She's eeevil!

Where The Ring Virus falls flat is that it isn’t scary. At all. It’s almost like the filmmakers knew that their audience would have seen Ringu, so they made a film starring Korean actors designed to invoke memories of the earlier film. There are three great scare scenes in Ringu; the cursed tape, the scene in the well, and the scene where Sadako emerges from the TV. The Ring Virus has equivalents to all of those, but it rushes through them, not bothering to build tension or establish atmosphere. The Ring Virus also makes the Sadako character a much more normal person. There’s really no indication that Eun-suh had a particularly troubled childhood after her mother committed suicide, and she even grew up to have a normal job before her murder. All these decisions, and some very flat acting, render The Ring Virus completely harmless.

Posted: Wed - September 15, 2004 at      

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