Rings

2002's The Ring had a supremely silly premise about a cursed videotape that was somehow tied to the tragic death of an evil little girl, who now roams the earth as vengeful spirit that kills anyone who watched the tape.  The story didn't make a lot of sense, and probably made less sense the closer you looked at it.  Still, the film managed to be successful, thanks to a tense and atmospheric style by director Gore Verbinski, and a strong lead performance by Naomi Watts.  Over time, the effectiveness of that film (and the original Japanese movie that inspired it) was diluted by the inferior sequel we got in 2005, as well as a string of low rent knock offs, all remakes of other Asian horror films, such as The Grudge, One Missed Call, Pulse and Dark Water.  Rings is an attempt to reboot the franchise and bring it back to the forefront where it once stood, but all it does is ram home the fact that the image of the ghoulish girl with the long, greasy black hair covering its face is just not scary anymore.

Just like other early year releases like The Bye Bye Man and Monster Trucks, Rings has taken a longer than expected trip to the big screen.  Originally filmed and set to be released back in 2015, the original cut scored poorly with test audiences, and so the movie went under a series of major reshoots in an attempt to save it.  During that time, the movie was pushed around a large variety of release dates for the past two years, until it is finally just now hitting theaters.  Say what you will about the earlier Ring films, at least they seemed to be targeting an adult audience, and gave us an interesting lead heroine with Naomi Watt's Rachel, as she tried to uncover the truth behind the mystery haunting her.  Rings, on the other hand, is strictly teen horror fluff.  The direction by F. Javier Gutierrez (a Spanish filmmaker making his Hollywood debut) is bland and shows no distinction, the characters are your typical teenage idiots who walk blindly into one dangerous situation after another, and any suspense the earlier films may have built has been replaced with lame, overblown horror sequences, such as the one that opens the film, where the evil ghost Samara somehow is able to take down an entire airliner by crawling out of the monitor in the cockpit.  Yes.

Our heroine this time around is Julia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), a young girl who is forced to watch her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) go off to college without her, as she has to stay behind to look after her sick mother.  They keep in touch for a while, but suddenly all communication from Holt stops, and Julia starts being haunted by nightmares that she feels are somehow connected to him.  She immediately gets in the car, apparently completely forgetting about the sick mom situation, and drives to the college campus to look for him.  She tries to get some answers from a college professor named Gabriel (Johnny Galecki from TV's The Big Bang Theory), and even though he brushes her off, he seems to be hiding something.  Curious, she follows Gabriel, and finds out that he is the head of a secret group of people who are obsessed with the cursed video tape that kills you seven days after you watch it, and are trying to crack its secrets, as Gabriel thinks the tape may somehow lead to answers about the afterlife.   The students obsessed with the tape all hang out in some hidden room in the academic building, which looks like some kind of strange hipster nightclub.

Just as in the earlier movies, the curse of the videotape can be ended if you make a copy of it and pass it on to someone else.  So, Gabriel and his followers have been endlessly copying and passing the tape around so that they can continue to study it safely.  Naturally, things have started to go wrong, when one of the students in the program ends up dead.  Turns out Holt is part of this bizarre program, and in order to keep him alive, Julia watches the tape herself.  However, the version she watches is somehow different, and features some new footage which is apparently tied to the background of the evil ghost.  I guess you could call it the Director's Cut.  This new video leads Julia and Holt to drive to a ghost town that is tied to the past of the evil Samara, and holds further clues about her birth, which seem to be tired to another teenage girl who mysteriously went missing 30 years ago.  This town of secrets holds a blind man with a lot of exposition to impart (Vincent D'Onofrio), a bunch of skittish people who don't like to talk about the past, and an ancient crypt that may hold the secret to Samara's origin.

As silly as the idea of the underground college community obsessed with examining the cursed videotape may sound, it at least has the potential to spin the story off in a different direction.  Too bad not long after it's introduced, the movie completely drops it, and gives us the exact same stuff we saw 15 years ago.  I would wager that pretty much all of the big "scare" moments in Rings hare been lifted directly from the first movie, beat for beat.  What little new thrills have been added are of the menial "jump scare" variety, such as the camera suddenly cutting away from the heroes to a vicious dog barking, or even intensifying ordinary everyday sounds on the soundtrack, such as someone popping open an umbrella.  And when it can't think of any original images or ideas, it starts using actual clips lifted directly from the original movie.  It's almost as if the movie itself wishes it were the original instead of what it ultimately became due to its troubled production.

The only people I can see this movie appealing to are the small handful who are truly interested in learning more about Samara's pitiful backstory, and how she became the vengeful little ghoul that she is today.  Unfortunately, it can't manage to muster much excitement about it.  Even the actors seem a bit more uninvolved than they should be.  The cast is made up of fresh young faces who are paying their due in a horror movie, as a lot of young actors must early on in their careers.  The old pros who do show up, such as Galecki and D'Onofrio, are more or less doing as little as they can.  You can almost see them waiting for the director to yell "cut", so they can walk off the set and have a long, sad talk with their agents.  You can't really blame them.  They must have known what a recycled and uninspired project this was going to turn out to be.

Rings is truly recycled in every sense of the word.  From its images, to its ideas, right down to its scares, it's constantly reminding you of better movies that came before it.  It doesn't want to thrill, or create a sense of tension or even fun in its audience.  It simply wanders down the same path the first movie did, only with an occasional detour or two that just doesn't work.  Instead of reviving the franchise, this reboot is likely to bury it further in the ground.  At least it's nice to think so.

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