[KFCC] Ring Virus Review

Story: Seon-Joo who is a reporter decided to look into the mysterious circumstances of her nieces death. As she investigates she find that her niece was not the only one to die in a similar matter. Eventually she locates a videotape filled with strange images and seems to hold a curse where you have a week to live. Seon-Joo seeks out the help of Doctor Choi who told her that the death were caused by a supernatural phenomenon. Together they must uncover the secret of the curse before it is too late.

Review: Ring Virus is the Korean version of the successful Japanese movie called Ring, Ring Virus is supposed to be much closer the original book than the Japanese version. Before continuing to read the review we must mention that we previous seen Ring and this affects our judgement of this movie. The story is good and is easy to follow but compared to Ring, the characters come up with answers too easily while in Ring you had an apparent and logical research that moved the story forward.

You have the same set of characters in this movie, but they were less interesting. Doctor Choi for one was terrible, he was an annoying character and took away from the movie. The characters are for one part responsible for transmitting the fear factor onto the viewers but in this movie they did a mediocre job of that.

The general horror and fear factor was not too apparent in this movie, in the Japanese version you have a slow ambient fear factor that would build up during the movie. In this one you had some creepy scenes but the effect was so so. As for the videotape which was probably the most powerful item in the Japanese version basically sucked in Ring Virus, the video was not even scary in the least. After seeing Ring, the same story will loose a bit of the horror element, so our review of the fear factor is not the best but we did find the overall quality to be weaker than the Japanese version.

The subtitles were very good in this movie, there is quite a bit of important dialog so you will have to pay attention. Between Ring Virus and Ring we think Ring is a far better movie, it has a better progression of the story, stronger fear factor and more believable characters. Honestly we feel our review of this movie is not fair because we have seen the Japanese version prior. If you are interesting in the Ring story we suggest watch the Japanese version first as watching the Korean version will ruin the surprises in the Japanese version.