Review of Rings (2017) by Jaime M — 03 May 2017

"Some old videotapes should've been better off left on the shelf".

Movie Review: Rings.

Date Viewed: February 9 2017.

Directed By F. Javier Gutierrez.

Screenplay By David Loucka, Jacob Aaron Estes and Akiva Goldsman, Story By David Loucka and Jacob Aaron Estes, Based on the 1998 horror film "Ring" from Hideo Nakata.

Starring: Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio, Bonnie Morgan, Aimee Teegarden, Chuck David Willis, Patrick R. Walker, Zachary Roerig, Laura Wiggins, Lizzie Brochere, Karen Cessay, Dave Blamy, Michael E. Sanders, Randall Taylor, Drew Grey, Kayli Carter, Jill Jane Clements, Ricky Muse and Jeremy Harrison.

This movie never crosses the fiery circus ring at all. "Rings" is a wholly unnecessary follow-up to the 2002 hit horror film "The Ring". The first movie and the original 1998 Japanese film both centered around a cursed videotape that kills people in seven days after they've watched the tape. Director Gore Verbinski and Naomi Watts are nowhere to be found in this new movie but hey! we got Vincent D'Onofrio and Dr. Leonard Hofstadter from "The Big Bang Theory"! May I demand a refund?

"Rings" is not only a half-assed sequel with slick production values and without any members from the original cast or crew, it also has one major problem. How can the cursed videotape kill people when nobody is using VHS anymore? Wait a minute? Now the cursed tape kills people by simply transferring into the digital age? "Rings" doesn't explore that aspect at all and it simply makes no sense whatsoever. The tagline for the poster says, "First You Watch It, Then You Die". How about if you don't watch this movie because it feels like the son of an old tape to the son of an old tape to another son of an old tape and.... you get the idea.

This sequel or reboot or whatever you call it follows a bad dude named Holt (Alex Roe) who's about to head off for college leaving his beautiful girlfriend, Julia (Matilda Lutz) behind. She starts to grow concerned for Holt after she loses contact with him. Suddenly in her computer blog, she sees a panicked girl who asks about Holt's whereabouts and then the screen turns blank.

Getting increasingly worried, Julia travels to Holt's college campus where she encounters a professor named Gabriel Brown (Johnny Galecki). She follows him to a private area of the college where a cult group known as "The Sevens" are involved in an experiment that involves the same cursed videotape from the first two American "Ring" movies.

Then Julia sees the same woman she saw on her computer and she takes her into her room to watch the video. Julia locks herself in the bathroom and the woman who is named Skye (Aimee Teegarden) gets murdered by the lanky-haired young girl known as Samara Morgan (Bonnie Morgan). Eventually Julia does find Holt and she's not willing to let him go out of her sights again. When Julia moronically does watch the video, she gets a burnt mark on her hand and that means more bad news for her and Holt. Vincent D'Onofrio co-stars as a blind cemetery caretaker who may or may not have a connection to Samara and his talents are completely wasted here.

Spanish director F. Javier Gutierrez has vacuum cleaned all the good scares from "The Ring" and he sucks out cheap jump-scares and horror movie cliches. The performances are awful, the plot is pure nonsense and the screenplay by David Loucka (Dream House and House at the End of the Street), Jacob Aaron Estes (Mean Creek and The Details) and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind, A Time to Kill, The Da Vinci Code, Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, Winter's Tale) is more unstructured and convoluted than scary.

The 2002 original "Ring" may have been a huge hit but it led to more silly J-horror remakes like "The Grudge", "Shutter", "One Missed Call" and "Mirrors". Thankfully they all stopped and horror movies have gotten a lot better over the past few years thanks to "The Conjuring" movies, "Don't Breathe", "The Babadook", "The Cabin in the Woods" and so forth. Some old videotapes should've been better off left on the shelf and "Rings" is no exception.