Review // Rings

College is a magical place. You’re on your own for the first time, you meet new and exciting people, and you join a club where you watch a video that kills you in seven days. That’s what school was like for me, and that’s what it’s like for Holt (Alex Roe), one of the characters in the new horror sequel Rings. Directed by F. Javier Guitiérrez, Rings is the third installment in the franchise which started in 2002 with The Ring. In it a cursed video is discovered which kills the viewer within a week. Flash forward to present day and the video seems to be a well known urban legend. So much so that strangers on an airplane bring it up in casual conversation in the film’s opening scene. Nevertheless it takes a young professor discovering the tape in an estate sale VCR for the events of Rings to begin.

Our hero is Julia, (Matilda Lutz), a teenage girl who travels to a state college after her boyfriend, the aforementioned Holt, stops returning her calls. There she runs into Gabriel Brown (Johnny Galecki), a biology teacher running an experiment about the haunted video tape for some reason. Driving a beat up old car and working out of an office with a keg in it, Gabriel is that cool professor who everyone wanted to be friends with. Being friends with Gabriel, however, involves watching the cursed video, which features an assortment of spooky images like a well and a ladder. Subjects are then assigned a “tail”, a buddy who keeps an eye on them for seven days. Before the seven days are up, that buddy watches a copy of the video, accepting the curse for themselves. It’s a good system, one that could never go wrong. Unless of course a demon girl comes out of your TV and kills your tail. As is the case with Holt, forcing Julia to watch the video herself.

While this first act is quite intriguing and sets up an interesting scenario, the latter half of the movie jettisons most of the interesting elements.When trying to make her own copy of the tape, Julia discovers a second video inside the file data, one which features new and cryptic imagery. Instead of staying at the university where there are people studying the video professionally and a lot of equipment to keep an eye on everyone, Julia and Holt head out on a mission to find the last resting place of Samara (the waterlogged demon girl from the tape) using this new video as a sort of treasure map. It eventually guides them to a Sacrament Valley a foggy town presided over by an old church and a creepy graveyard. It feels like a strange turn for a film that seemed like it was going to be set at a university.

The most disappointing thing about the films is that it ditches the “seven days” suspense that made the first film so memorable. Though in an early scene a character is killed right in front of Julia after their time runs out, it only seems to be a passing concern for our protagonists. At one point in the film’s second act, Holt tells Julia he has 12 hours to live, then goes to bed and falls asleep. Julia experiences dark visions as the days go on, but we’re never given an idea of how much time has passed. The screenwriters ditched the core device of the series in favour of more recent ideas from the horror lexicon – like the infectious demon-passing of It Follows and the scary blind man in an old house of Don’t Breathe – and it makes the film feel like a mess.  

It’s also rarely able to deliver anything very scary. The two biggest jump scares are just audio based transitions between scenes, and the early appearance of Samara makes all the subsequent “emerging from a screen” scenes generate little more than a shrug. That same reaction is all that’s generated by Matilda Lutz’s performance. Though to be fair the actors aren’t helped much by the screenplay. Vincent D’Onofrio – easily the film’s biggest name – plays a less scary version of James Earle Jones’ character from the Sandlot, and spends most of his screen time delivering exposition. It reached a point in the screening where audience members were laughing in scenes that were clearly supposed to be scary. It’s too bad too, because the university study idea was actually pretty intriguing. But don’t worry horror fans, the film ended with a nice, sequel ready cliffhanger. So maybe next film someone in Cursed Video Studies 101 will put this franchise to bed once and for all. 

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.