FREE: 2 VHS Movies: "The Ring" & "The Haunting"

The listing, 2 VHS Movies: "The Ring" & "The Haunting" has ended.

Halloween is coming, so how about some horror and suspense.

"The Ring" -With its disturbing images and a few good shocks, The Ring is the kind of frightfest you'll watch to set a chilling mood or spook your susceptible friends, but when you try to sort it out, this well-mounted American remake (of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu, based on Koji Suzuki's popular novel) becomes a batch of incoherent parts. The negligible plot follows a Seattle reporter (Naomi Watts) as she investigates the death of her niece, the victim of a mysterious videotape that, according to urban legend, causes the viewer's death seven days later. (Fear Dot Com borrowed the same idea while avoiding this film's lofty pretensions.) The countdown structure follows the reporter, her son, and her estranged boyfriend into deepening layers of terror--all quite effective until the movie attempts to explain itself. At that you're better off shutting down your brain and letting the creepy visuals take over.

"The Haunting" -Certain to remain one of the greatest haunted-house movies ever made, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) is antithetical to all the gory horror films of subsequent decades, because its considerable frights remain implicitly rooted in the viewer's sensitivity to abject fear. A classic spook-fest based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (which also inspired the 1999 remake directed by Jan de Bont), the film begins with a prologue that concisely establishes the dark history of Hill House, a massive New England mansion (actually filmed in England) that will play host to four daring guests determined to investigate--and hopefully debunk--the legacy of death and ghostly possession that has given the mansion its terrifying reputation.