I love horror movies. Demons, slashers, ghosts, goalies, guys with knife fingers, psychotic brothers in white-painted William Shatner masks…I love them all. So, as you can imagine, I was very excited to see The Ring. Several people whose opinions I trusted had told me it was the scariest thing they'd seen in a long time, that they'd spent half the movie under their seats, yadda yadda yadda.

It wasn't that scary.

The Ring is not a horror movie. It's a supernatural suspense thriller, with a couple of good scares to make you jump, and a few gross parts thrown in to satisfy the horror quotient. I will admit that I had my hand over my eyes a few times, peering through my fingers, just because I knew something scary and/or gross was going to happen, and I had to go home to a dark house, alone, when I was done. While horror movies themselves don't often scare me, the right corpse at the right angle can come back to haunt me at 3 a.m. when the cat knocks something over in the living room.

Seven other people went to the movies with me that night, and our opinions varied widely. At least one outright hated it, and a few were scared enough to admit it, but most of us were…relatively unimpressed.

Once again, I've unfortunately chosen to review a movie where I can't really give anything away. The opening scene was a nice little capsule of what was to come—two teenage girls scaring themselves silly with stories about a video that kills you seven days after you watch it. Now, I've seen some bad movies in my time, but I don't think any of them have caused actual death—even delayed death—so I admit, I was interested. The bad part was that, while effectively setting the scene and explaining outright something that could easily have taken the whole movie to reveal, the opening scene was so chock-full of cheesy, teen-horror gags it took away a great deal of the zing. To the film's credit, though, I don't recall one instance of a cat jumping out when you least expect one. (Remember, kids: the first noise is always the cat. The second noise is whatever's coming to kill you.)

Naturally, one of the helpless teenage Catholic schoolgirls in the opening buys the farm. Her death is the first clue that there's going to be some freaky editing coming up, and that the director is going to take every possible chance to startle you.

And no, I didn't really give anything away there. Someone always dies in the first scene. I left the mystery of which one for you to solve on your own.

Now, with the "unexplained" death of the girl, we get into the real story. The girl's Aunt Rachel (Naomi Watts), a hard-nosed, Lois Lane-style reporter (with the prerequisite emotional baggage and implications that she's a less-than-stellar mother to her slightly weird son) starts digging into her unusual death.

Enter the tape.

The tape that kills you is freaky. I'm not going to deny that. In fact, the tape is the scariest part of the whole movie, mostly because the first time you see it, you honestly have no idea what it means. As Rachel and her whatever-guy Noah (Martin Henderson) race to save themselves and protect their son, Aidan (David Dorfman, who, by the way, officially fills my quota of freaky little kids—no more freaky kids in movies for at least ten years), we slowly learn the story behind the tape. Honestly, it's got some holes.

That's what bothers me the most in the aftermath, I think. There were some things that made absolutely no sense. Not in the Unbreakable made-no-sense kind of way, though. More like they'd cut some important scenes for time that would explain the one thing I wanted to know. Also, the movie ends at least three times, that I can recall. I was gathering my purse and putting on my jacket…and the film kept going. Ten minutes later, I got all ready to bolt up again…and there was still more. When the movie finally did end, I refused to take my eyes off the screen until I actually saw credits rolling.

The Ring wasn't a bad movie, per se, but I went in with certain expectations, and it fell quite short of them. In fact, I'm going to have to say that the best part of the whole theater-going experience was the trailer for The Two Towers. But, taking into consideration the reactions of everyone else in the theater, and my own irrational reluctance to use my VCR when I got home, The Ring gets three, um… Three cups of coffee! Yeah, that's it! (My beta reader has declared that asterisks just don't cut it.) [Editor's Note: Tell your beta reader to consult with Graphic Design first next time, 'kay? We can't whip out icons at a moment's notice, ya know! Sheesh! </Editorial Rant>].

It wasn't precisely what I wanted to see, but it certainly seemed to scare the pants off the rest of the audience.

Oh, and I have only one final piece of advice—make a copy.