I spoke about Dr. Strangelove yesterday, but today another movie of that sort is on called Fail Safe. Now, this is actually a remake of a movie in the 60’s of the same name, and is essentially a serious version of Dr. Strangelove. The interesting thing about the remake however is that the network that made it had it be shown live on TV (this was in 2000). I hate that you can’t buy it on DVD though, except for some region 2 version on Amazon.uk, which doesn’t even make sense as it was make here.

Ah, the moment I’ve been waiting for: another edition of Movie Expose! Anyway, today I’m looking at the similarities between a movie that I loved, The Ring, and another movie based off a Japanese Horror movie, The Grudge. These have been slightly overdiscussed in forums and by word of mouth a lot since the trailer came out, but it really is striking how similar they are. I will now show you three pictures (each one containing a picture from the trailer of The Grudge on top, and from The Ring on the bottom). Some of these aren’t complete copies, but it’s more the sheer number of times that fairly similar things occur that bothers me.

Some direct similarities here. 

It may be harder to see it here, so I will explain what was happening in the trailer. On top, we have Sarah Michelle Gellar on the right, and a oval mirror on the left. In both mirrors, we have a young girl (that’s what it looks like anyway) that will be shown below. You can clearly see that the same shot angle was taken, and then just the idea behind it.

Two evil people, or they the same? I can’t tell! 

Now we have the two bad people in the movies. This might be clearer in motion, but simply the design of the two characters is quite similar. Long black hair, both crawling on the floor in a similar fashion, the arms even look somewhat the same. When I first saw the trailer for The Grudge, I honestly thought that it was for the sequel to The Ring (which is coming out in 2005, by the way).

Not so much direct similarity here, but more of the overall style. 

Not directly similar, but you have two close ups on an eye reflecting something (neither eye is human, though from The Ring it is actually a horse, and I’m not sure what it is in The Grudge).

Well, there you have it. This may just be some Japanese thing (though I don’t think Samara, the girl in The Ring, was shown like this in the original Japanese version, so that doesn’t work), but I think that someone should sue. This really is turning into a movie blog, isn’t it?

#m

Yes, that’s right! Turn it into a movie blog, you know you want to! BWUHAHAHAHAHA!

No! He will never succumb to the dark side! Keep it funny, Michael! You have inner strength!

And on an unrelated note, congratualations on being the bestest actor at Tess’s play-reading party thing.

Who says a movie blog can’t be funny? And you wanna know what’s worse than a movie blog… A POLITICS BLOG!

[...] And that was another segment of Eerie Similarities. For more, see another one of my other segments. [...]