2016 featured lots of great horror films that were mainly independent, but the wide release fare also made a great showing. Sequels like The Conjuring 2 and Ouija 2: Origin of Evil (and what a shocker when that film turned out to be good) helped buff a somewhat average wide-release horror showing.
2017 hasn’t started off with similar success and Rings serves as an unfortunate opening to 2017’s horror lineup.
Rings is the latest in the American version of the Japanese, Ringu (or Ring) franchise, known best for the initial adaptation, 2002’s The Ring (helmed by superstar director Gore Verbinski.) The Ring served to set the blueprint for further American adaptations of Japanese horror films while also skyrocketing Western interest in the original films.
The plot of the franchise centers around a videotape which has a seemingly unrelated series of bleak images that causes anyone who watches it to die within six days thanks to the ghost haunting the video, Samara.
The original film (and to a lesser degree its original sequel) set standards for jump-scares as well an overall general ominous atmosphere in horror films. Rings misses that mark by quite a bit.
Rings revolves around Julia (played by Matilda Lutz) who is dating Holt (played by Alex Roe) before he heads off across the state to college. Holt joins up with Professor’s research experiment (played by Big Bang Theory star Johnny Galecki).
Together, they watch the cursed video and then film themselves during the aforementioned seven day waiting period before their deaths, which they manage to avoid if they show the video to another person who hasn’t seen it. From here the film makes a bunch of decisions that really only detract from its experience.
One of the biggest cons of the film is that it is very thinly a horror movie; Honestly its barely even a thriller. Last year’s Green Room maintained an oppressive tension throughout 70 percent of its runtime while this film only manages to illicit around six minutes of suspense.
Samara is used sparingly in the film, but she doesn’t feel like the oppressive force of nature that the Japanese films or the original American adaptations make her out to be. She’s more of a minor annoyance.
In the previous films, the seven days build-up led to a gradual heightening up of scares each day, but here the seven days are mostly ignored after the first hour, and the film instead seeks to explore mythology that retcons the second film of the series. The mythology is somewhat interesting and explains much of the American film series’ backstory but the thing is that without an interesting wrapper around it, I have no reason to care.
The protagonists (Holt and Julia) are also really unlikeable and even unbelievable. The whole pull of the plot is that Holt doesn’t text Julia back after a few days of her talking with him and because of that she decides to drive hours to see him at his school in order to investigate whether he’s alright.
It’s insane that the least believable part about this ghost story is how much Julia loves Holt. He literally doesn’t text her back for a few days and she decides to launch a full-scale investigation to ensure that he’s safe.
The plotline has its own problems but there’s even more in the dialogue itself. The characters feel like robots talking to each other which honestly fits in with the robotic feelings of the actors.
No offense to Johnny Galecki, but he looks like an Oscar winner next to the rest of the supporting cast in this film. Matilda Lutz would be outclassed by anyone who could read a script. Anybody out there who wants to be an actor or actress should take great solace in her ability to find work, since she shows that miracles really can come true when you’re trying to make it in the film industry. I can only hope that she improves in the next films she appears in.
Prior to seeing the film, someone told me that the scariest scenes included a dog’s barking and the opening of an umbrella (this opening itself not being the product of anything horrifiying, just a normal jump cut to the sudden opening of an umbrella). I was floored when this turned out to be true. The films scariest moments are a result of just regular jump-cuts and the scenes that it intended to be scary are just left flat.
Another thing that really hurt this film is that the makeup of the film initially is really interesting to me. The idea of college students experimenting with the other side has been done before but taking an established franchise and working it through that angle is a really interesting idea to me.
Rings was pushed back in its release several times before it finally released last week. It was initially scheduled to be released in November of 2015 before being switched to October 2016 and then finally hitting screens this February.
This leads me to question whether it was re-shoots that led to the film’s constantly changing release date. The opening 20 minutes of the film has a vibe that is entirely different to the rest of its runtime.
An early scene of the film even seems to set up a future scare in which Julia walks down a hallway with a video camera filming the entire hallway and a television set underneath the camera showing the recording. This definitely feels like something that was meant to have a bigger role in the film, yet it’s never touched on again.
In the days before I saw the film, I was tipped off on the original short film, Rings, released in 2005 in the lead-up to The Ring Two. This short is honestly one of the better Ring related releases in the entire franchise, Japanese or American. It’s just a real shame that the feature-length adaptation couldn’t really get
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