Ring 0: Birthday

Wonderful? Great? Excellent? I read with disbelief some of the reviews here. Was I watching a different movie? Of the three Ringu movies, this one was definitely the weakest link. The problem was, I couldn't quite decide whether Ringu 0 was a horror movie, or a throwback to 1970s Asian romance movies. Specifically Taiwanese ones, where the female half of a romance usually ended up either blind, stricken with some incurable disease, or dead, and there were usually an evil parent, step-parent, in-law, or rival in the background. Ringu 0 had an incomprehensible plot, and was mostly melodrama at its worst. Where were the scares that defined Ringu and Ringu 2? A repeat of spooky scenes from the first two movies (e.g. mad mother staring into the mirror, bone-cracking walk/crawl, etc.) do not count. There were simply no original scary scenes here. Plus, what was that nonsense about Sadako splitting into two? Aieee!! What works well in Japanese horror manga (for example, the excellent "Tomei" series about a teenage girl who cannot die despite being murdered repeatedly because her body parts simply regenerate into separate identical persons) simply do not work well on screen. I wished the producers had stopped at Ringu 2. Sigh...