Review of Rings (2017) by Lovro H — 19 Apr 2017

Rings is a sequel to the American remake of Ringu, The Ring, from 2002 and it's, surprisingly, not awful. Rings follows Julia and her boyfriend Holt as they try to discover the secret behind the tape.

It's a pretty hard plot to explain as it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but I'll do my best. So, Holt goes off to college. There he is introduced to the tape by his friend, Skye. Skye got introduced to the tape by her biology teacher, Gabriel.

Gabriel is very obsessed with the tape and what it means. He's so obsessed he starts an underground club. He thinks the tape is an answer to one of the biggest questions; does a soul exist and where does it go after death? He conducts some experiments and finds out a very interesting thing.

You can avoid dying in 7 days. When you're done watching the video, you make a copy of it and show it to somebody else. Then the person you showed it to is haunted by Samara instead of you. So, Julia sacrifices herself and watches the copy Holt made so he doesn't die.

But, now Julia is in danger and in order to save her, the gang must find out the mystery behind Samara. That's, more or less, it. I really do appreciate the fact that they tried to expand on the mythology of the tape and do something different for this movie, even though it can get really silly.

What I love the most about this movie is the direction. It's fairly well directed. I was surprised by how good the movie looked. The colours were very grim and creepy, and the overall creepy atmosphere was well achieved through those colours.

The CGI wasn't the best, though. Samara looks alright, but the way she climbs out of the television looks incredibly cheap and took me out of the mood a little. Also, the "Ring faces" are quite ridiculous.

"Ring faces" are the faces that people make when Samara gets to them. I didn't find the movie to be scary, but I did find it creepy due to the atmosphere and good direction. The acting was okay.

My favourite performance is by Vincent D'Onofrio who plays a blind priest that shows up in the last 30 or so minutes of the movie. He's actually scarier than Samara, at least in this movie. The characters are nothing special.

There's nothing memmorable about them. The ending I still don't know how to feel about. It leaves room for more sequels and is an intriguing end, but it just doesn't make any sense. All in all, Rings is an okay horror movie that is well directed and has interesting expansions on the Samara mythology, but is hard to make sense of.

I would recommend this movie to the fans of the franchise.