Heavily hyped remake of a little-seen Japanese horror film follows around a Nancy Drew reporter (Naomi Watts) as she looks into the rumor of a videotape that kills its viewers one week to the minute after they view it. She even looks at the tape herself after intrepidly tracking down a copy of it at the Shelter Mountain Inn, where four simultaneously deceased teenagers had stayed the week previous. (The video looks a bit like a product of the 1920s avant-garde cinema, but not necessarily lethal.) She then asks the appropriate journalistic questions: "Who made it? Where'd it come from?" She has exactly one week to find the answers. Directed by the chameleonic Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt, The Mexican), the film is rather poorly photographed in a nauseous bluey-green or a bilious greeny-blue, but is watchable all the same. Its emphasis falls more on detective work than on cheap thrills, and it offers some quietly creepy details (the housefly in the video which can be plucked off the screen in freeze-frame mode) as well as one hair-raising scene of a panicked horse running free on a ferry. It even has a satisfactory if incomprehensible ending, before it presses on mandatorily to a less satisfactory and no more comprehensible second ending. With Martin Henderson, Brian Cox, Jane Alexander. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd