Possibly the most startling thing about Rings, the bizarrely belated trilogy capper for the American wing of the Ring franchise, is the fact that it exists at all. After all, the last time Paramount made itself a Ring movie, it was The Ring Two all the way back in 2005 that managed to derail all the good work done by Gore Verbinski’s handsome remake despite employing the talents of the man who started it all, Hideo Nakata.
But even taking into account the twelve years between sequels, it’s not like the franchise had actually gone anywhere because over in Japan, little ghost girls where still popping out of TV sets thanks to a 3D reboot franchise kicking off in 2012 and even a versus movie that saw the series’ antagonist go head to head with the ghoul from Ju-On: The Grudge. Did we need another Ring sequel? No. Did we want another Ring sequel? Also, no. But against such overwhelming apathy, could the latest resurgence of The Ring at least stay in the public consciousness for seven days?
After a plane crash occurs when someone suffering from Samara’s curse is dumb enough to get on a flight with only hours left on his deadline, his copy of the videotape that carries the haunted vignette eventually falls into the hands of college professor Gabriel Brown roughly two years later. From here we are introduced to adoring couple Julia and Holt who are about to be separated when the latter goes off to college, but while they keep their long distance relationship going, Julia begins to get suspicious when Holt becomes incommunicado for a few days.
Suspicion turns to alarm when she’s contacted by a panicking student named Skye who is also desperate to find Holt and unwilling to be kept in the dark any longer, Julia makes the trio to Holt’s college to try and get to the bottom of things. However, after meeting some of Holt’s oddly hostile classmates and his teacher, who turns out to be – who else – Gabriel Brown, Julia finally tracks down Skye in order to get some answers, but she ultimately gets ones she wasn’t counting on. It seems that Brown, after discovering the Samara curse tape, has transferred it to digital and been using it to examine the notion of life after death by setting up a secret community of students who all watch the video in shifts. Experiencing the surreal effects of the days leading up to the fatal deadline, the students are saved from a face-twisting fate when they copy it and send it to the next in line.
However, the reason that Skye is sweating so much is that Holt is supposed to be the one getting her off the hook, but his disappearance is cutting this too close for comfort.
Before you know it, Julia is tumbling down the Samara rabbit hole (or well) in order to solve the riddle of the ghost’s past once and for all, but it seems that the curse is changing – or should that be upgrading?
You can see why someone thought it was time to give Samara an update from stodgy old VHS to something a bit more modern – after all, Sadako 3D had already given the classic premise a digital upgrade and I guess someone figured that if they could update the American end too, it might give the franchise a new burst of life. However, it takes a lot more than just injecting modern tech into proceedings to help Samara get her groove back, and Rings almost immediately shoots itself in the foot by being almost unimaginably uninspired and plain unscary to boot. Obviously, Spanish filmmaker F. Javier Gutiérrez had big plans to try and visually toy with Samara’s infamous killing method and her iconic, horror-diva entrance, but unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have planned for the rest of the film other than restoring Verbinski’s sickly green hue.
For a start, the film opts to switch out the idea of having more mature characters take point and replace them with students much like 80% of all other horror films that currently exist and immediately lumps us in with the standard loved-up couple who sickenly tell each other romantic legends while rolling around in idyllic bedrooms. Matilda Lutz may have impressed in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, but she’s dull as dishwater here as she goes off on a stock mystery adventure and her vanilla nature of her character is only enhanced by the stiffness of her performance. Still, she’s a fucking dynamo compared to Alex Roe’s insipid boyfriend who technically causes this entire mess by not following some simple instructions, and as they both wade deeper into the mire of Samara’s convoluted backstory, you find you don’t give a single shit about either of them.
Usually, it’s the supporting cast who tend to add a bit colour to these things anyway, but even here, they end up standing out rather than propping up, and not for the right reasons. For example, I defy you to watch Johnny Galecki inhabit the role of a god-playing professor and not see him as Doctor Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory after some sort of alarming midlife crisis. Vincent D’Onofrio fares far better, spouting out exposition from under blind-guy glasses and his Kingpin physique (“YOU’VE EMBARRASSED ME! IN FRONT OF SAMARA!”), but by this point, the extended backstory of Samara’s past has gotten so convoluted, it’s touch to believe that those seven days sealed in a well were an actual high point of her miserable existence.
However, the only time Gutiérrez pulls himself out of the dull trudge the film locks itself into is when he gets to play with and screw around with Samara’s power set. However, even here it feels like the movie is butting it’s head against a brick wall trying to add bells and whistles to one of horror’s perfect setpieces. Sticking Samara on a plane in the opening sequence feels like the kind of over-excited, coke-fueled craziness that sent Jason Voorhees to space and it doesn’t really fit the somberness of the franchise particularly well. However, a moment that sees the vengeance-seeking ghost-brat emerge from a flat screen TV that’s laying face down works impressively well, but from here, the dangers of shifting the curse from analogue to digital isn’t really explored until literally the dying moments of the movie. Whenever the franchise seems to veer into the further territories laid out by the original author, Koji Suzuki, things always seem to go squirrely. Focus fully on the curse and you’re mostly fine, but start expanding out to explore Samara/Sedako trying to be reborn via some form of possession and you’ll find that the franchise has an impressive fail rate.
Most likely the last gasp of the American part of the Ring franchise, the series would continue to crawl out of Japanese screens for at least two more installments. However it’s become pretty damn apparent that the angry antagonist might be wise in finally pulling the plug on her audio/visual brand of revenge…
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