Rings (2017) Review
Rings (2017) Review
Meet Julia (Italian actress Matilda Lutz). Julia is madly in love with her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) who seems rather adverse to the idea of wearing a T-shirt, perhaps it’s washday. Holt is off to college but that’s OK as the love-birds can keep in touch online, but what’s this? Holt has stopped responding to her messages! That just won’t do! Julia jumps in the car and drives over to Holt’s college residence to find out why – clingy bitch! However it transpires that Julia was right to do so as Holt has watched a video tape, the same video tape that urban legend dictates will see the viewer die seven days later.
To save her beloved’s life Julia watches the same clip only to discover that there’s a movie within the movie that no one has ever seen before that points towards the fate of Samara’s body. How is it that the cursed video tape was available at college for Holt to view? Well that will be because his college professor Gabriel (Johnny Galecki, The Big Bang Theory) bought an old VCR, at an estate sale, that just happened to have the damn thing lurking inside.
Rather than stay away from the cassette, Gabriel has instead started a secret college group called ‘The Sevens’ where students can watch the tape and film themselves before passing the tape on to another for them to do the same. Does this make sense to you? Call me old-fashioned but a college professor luring students to participate in an experiment that could result in their demise, and that they surprisingly go along with, hardly seems ethical, but hey that’s the premise that we are being asked to buy into here.
Gabriel sends Julia and Holt to the quiet small town of Sacrament Valley, where Samara’s body was buried, where the visual clues from the video tape are all too easily spotted by the duo. The clues lead to their meeting with a burly blind man Burke (Vincent D’Onofrio channelling the Blind Man from Don’t Breathe) who may not be quite the Good Samaritan he originally appears to be.
Film franchises are where it’s at in today’s world. From the Marvel comic book big screen spin-off’s to the latest Star Wars movies every studio is keen to tap into that vein, finding a lucrative story-base that they can churn multiple movies from. Within the horror genre the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, amongst many others, have been rebooted in the hope that it regenerates the brand name and affords the studio the luxury of decent box-office takings for many years down the line.
Whilst the folks at Disney, home of both the Avengers and Star Wars franchises, have nailed the formula successfully, horror revamps and reboots are struggling to do the same. That hasn’t stopped Universal from offering up another chapter/re-invention for the long-dormant Rings franchise. Unfortunately Rings failed to connect with audiences and, following an unspectacular showing at the box-office, it looks unlikely that there will be another American take on the Japanese story.
Director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s Rings gets off to a shaky start with an opening sequence set on an commercial flight that had me wondering if I was watching The Twilight Zone episode about a nervous passenger instead rather than Rings. Julia and Holt’s introductions are brisk and slight leaving no time to get to know our central twosome before things go tits up for them, not that Julia appears that bothered by the supernatural proceedings. She approaches the surreal situation level-headed, treating the mystery like it’s a Nancy Drew spin-off rather than potentially the end of her and Holt’s lives.
It’s effectively a rerun of Gore Verbinski’s 2002 movie but with a different video clip to investigate – which the twosome do so awfully quick! Samara should make her tapes more vague, it might actually make her mysterious imagery more of a challenge to figure out, otherwise she might as well have just told Julia and Holt what they needed to know, it would have a lot quicker. Rings is not great but it’s far more enjoyable, in a silly way, than the intentionally silly Sadako vs Kayako flick that has also recently done the rounds. There’s a lot wrong with Rings but do you know what? I didn’t switch it off, I kept watching, I knew where it was going and there were no surprises except for one, and that was that I ended up enjoying it a lot.
