Daily News from New York, New York • 55

sea "5'ISD CTll'JITZ REVOLT, IN PLAIN ENGLISH vau :4 CCD mm THE GREY ZONE. With David Arquette, Steve Busceml, Harvey Keitel. Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Running time: 108 mlns. Rated war atrocities.

At Angetlka, Loews Uncobi Square, Loews 72nd St. By JAMI BERNARD DAILY NEWS MOVIE CRITIC Ihe actor Tim Blake Nelson takes a little-known piece of Holocaust history and turns it into a furious philosophical debate that sounds a lot like David Mamet in the sad, provocative "The Grey Zone." 5 real-life incident and the moral gray zone Jy nC; I I -pi i'' vo rv -r the movie depicts is a departure from most Holocaust movies. The main characters here are no sheep being led, to the Slaughter, but the brutally clear-eyed Hungarian Jews who staged the only armed revolt recorded in thetcteBth. camps. These men formed one of Auschwitz's Sonderkom-mando squads, men who received a few extra months to 4 Plus perks like extra food, in return for cajoling their; fellow Jews into the gas chambers.

After stripping th.cjcjrpses of jewels, watches and gold fillings, the men shoveled the bodies into ovens whose ash fell like a terrible snow on the living. revolt this group finally staged had a minor effect rrpart -of the Nazi death machinery was damaged and never repaired. But the movie is about the one life the rebels chose to save, at their own peril, to redeem their souls. Nelson sidesteps the problem of multiple languages by having every character speak English, even when saying something in a tongue another character is not meant to understand. It's an interesting creative choice but not one that's terribly effective.

Steve Buscemi and David Arquette, speaking their own, modern English, are among the strange casting choices. Only Harvey Keitel, as a dipsomaniac German officer, affects an accent. Alan Corduner plays a Jewish doctor who grapples with his own demons. Like the cleanup squad, he has made a horrible pact: his family's well-being (and his own) in exchange for performing unthinkable human experiments for Mengele. It was this doctor's later memoirs that formed the core of this story.

nThis material began life as a stage play, and it still fels like one. The characters talk for the most part like scrappy gangsters in a '30s Warner Brothers movie as they debate their limited options like philosophers of the macabre. It's an intelligent, chilling movie, but one that can't quite shake those stage origins. Iklp I old Mod Death by videotape in a murky genre tale V2 mostly by Aidan, who is channeling the ghost of a young girl in the video. Verbinski who directed the Brad PittJulia Roberts fiasco, "The Mexican" is a fine visual stylist, and "The Ring," shot in the rain Seattle newspaper reporter and single mom, whose investigation into the death of a teenage niece puts her and her young son's life in jeopardy.

In the film's long tease opening, the niece dies of a heart attack exactly seven days after THE RING. With Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, Brian Cox. Directed by Gore Verbkiskl. Running time: 109 mlns. Rated PG-13: drug and alcohol content, sexuality, some violence and language.

watching a strange videotape and receiving a telephone call giving her a week to live. Ace reporter that she is, Rachel retraces her niece's steps to a wooded motel cabin where she finds the haunted video, and pops it into the VCR for her own viewing pleasure. It's a weird. and mist of the Pacific Northwest, is deftly atmospheric and genuinely creepy. The editing, full of quick cuts and foreboding, is hip enough for a music video.

While "The Ring" is a contextual dead ringer for the recent "FearDotCom" (sub the video with a Web site), the movie it most 4 wr The imagination of Salvador Dali meets the supernatural hustle of M. Night Shyamalan in Gore Verbinski's "The Ring," a horror ghost story that figures to become a cult film for the video generation. I hated it, but I grant that it does tap into a vein of technological horror the fear of the VCR! that will have young videophiles chatting it up for weeks. It's already generating "Blair Witch" buzz on the Internet. Adapted from both a series of Japanese novels and the Japanese film, TV and comic-book franchise they spawned, "The Ring" is certainly the strangest movie to come out of a Hollywood studio (DreamWorks) this year.

It's an art-house movie with philosophical pretensions, a murky story line and a disturbing, sequel-promising ending. A terrific lead performance from Aussie actress Naomi Watts, who emerged as a potential star in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," is about the only thing I enjoyed about it. Watts plays Rachel Keller, a symbolism-rich short, something you'd see at a festival of bad student films, with Dali-esque images suggesting family tragedy on a horse farm next to the sea. Having received her "death call," Rachel enlists the aid of Noah (New Zealander Martin Henderson), a video expert who happens to be her ex-boyfriend and the father of her psychic son, Aidan (David Dorfman). Of course, he watches it and gets a telephone call himself.

Then, Aidan, after sneaking a peek in the middle of a sleepless night, gets his call. "The Ring" follows Rachel and Noah as they race the clock to deconstruct the video and take away its power. Their clues are provided resembles in spirit is David Cronenberg's far superior "Video-drome," about a late-night TV program that infects the minds of its viewers. The hallucinatory quality of that film's imagery continues to haunt me, in ways "The Ring" never wilL But the subsequent video revolution deserves its own benchmark horror film, which the Japanese version, "Ringu," is among Asians, and which Verbinski's could become in the West. "Ringu," by the way, screens next weekend at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series "Scary Movies: 30 Years of Horror," which begins today.

E-mail; jmathewsfditnydaifynews.com A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL Harvey Keitel (r.) in the Holocaust tale, based on a survivor's memoirs.