Rings
Starring Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D’Onofrio and Bonnie Morgan. Directed by F. Javier Gutierrez. Opens Friday at major theatres. 102 minutes. 14A
Tip No. 1 for a manual on how to revive a dead horror-movie franchise would have to be this: Stay true to your original idea.
The advice would have aided Rings, the long-delayed third chapter of the killer-video spook story. It’s messily derived from a simple and scream-worthy concept that began in the 1990s with a superior Japanese novel and films, followed in the early 2000s by Hollywood adaptations.
Rings and its all-new cast follow a dozen years or so from The Ring 2 (2005), the unsatisfying first sequel to The Ring (2002) which found terror in a surreal VHS tape containing the vengeful ghost of an abuse victim named Samara. She looks like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family with her seriously shaggy hair.
Watch the tape, and seven days later Samara will climb out of the screen to murder you. But at least she thoughtfully telephones ahead.
Rings director F. Javier Gutierrez and his cabal of screenwriters might have made something out of how the outmoded VHS premise would adapt to the smartphone and social-media world that didn’t exist a generation ago.
They take a stab at it, so to speak, but far too much effort is expended on larding in ridiculous elements and characters that send the story in all directions, none of them involving brain cells or any real sense of dread.
There’s now a movie within the movie of the Samara tape, something that seems to have escaped the scrutiny of the secret society of college geeks who have been avidly studying it, under the tutelage of a shifty professor named Gabriel (Johnny Galecki of TV’s The Big Bang Theory).
They’re apparently able to dodge the death curse by passing it on to a “tail” — a sucker, in other words — much like the transit of the supernatural STD in It Follows. The rules of engagement aren’t terribly clear but the death is predictably gruesome for anyone who fails to heed them.
Enter brave Julia (Matilda Lutz), girlfriend of dim college freshman Holt (Alex Roe). He has naively fallen into the Samara cult and is marked for victimhood. Julia takes it upon herself to confront the menace, and apparently possesses clairvoyant abilities that allow her see that movie within a movie and to figure out what all the random spooky images mean. (She’d be great at deciphering Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.)
Julia gumshoes a trail that unravels Samara’s tragic past — although The Ring and The Ring 2 basically covered that off — as the movie suddenly turns into a knock-off of Don’t Breathe, the summer 2016 haunted-house hit.
Notice how Rings takes plot cues from recent horror hits? Gutierrez and his team obviously don’t believe in the currency of their own chills, further attempting to paper over gaps with jump-scares, sludgy cinematography, choppy editing and an obstreperous score.
And they have the gall to hint at further sequels. That’s really scary.
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