‘Rings’ Offers Little in the Way of Frightful Fun

Like this film’s iconic curse, the inevitable plague of January horror films finally captured my attention. Bluntly, Rings is a terrible movie: it’s predictably plotted, blandly shot and boring. Whereas the previous holder of the January 2017 crown for Worst Horror Movie, The Bye Bye Man, was at least intriguing in its ineptitude, Rings is so pedestrian it will have you wishing Samara would pop out from the screen and put you out of your misery too.

When college professor Dr. Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) stumbles upon the infamous VHS tape, he begins an experiment on his campus to explore the afterlife and the existence of the soul. With several of his students as test subjects, he continues the curse by having each student convince others to watch it. One student, Holt (Alex Roe), seemingly vanishes, arousing the suspicion of Holt’s girlfriend, Julia (Matilda Lutz). Julia tracks down Holt and discovers a video within the video. Guided by visions, Julia and Holt work together to discover Samara’s origin and stop her curse once and for all.

Back in the last days of VHS and analog media, the original Rings and its remakes fed into the urban legend craze of the late 90s and early 2000s. Add in the “spooky chain emails” and Internet curses that were all the rage and you had a great template for a horror movie. However, in an age where nearly everything is digital and easily debunked, these concepts seem dated. Rings falls into the trap of not acknowledging these changes in media consumption and feels like a retread of something no longer relevant in a digitally connected world. In the era of YouTube, Vine and Twitter, why are social media and online videos not the film’s focal point? Ironically, the only moments when the film even bothers to acknowledge that it takes place in 2017 and not 2002 are in the opening and closing scenes, which feel like a tease of what could have been.

Of course, the main draw of any Ring film is seeing what kind of mayhem Samara Morgan will wreak, so this movie has to at least deliver on that front, right? Well, get ready to be disappointed, because she’s hardly in the movie beyond fleeting cameos for the obligatory jumpscare sequence. Instead, we’re saddled with a pointless origin story that completely demystifies her character.

Rings falls into the all-too-common trap of modern horror remakes of trying to answer questions that shouldn’t be answered. The fear we derive from horror movie villains is the fear of the unknown and incomprehensible. We don’t need to know why Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees love hacking up horny teenagers — we let our imagination fill in the gaps. Even worse, Rings gives Samara a needlessly convoluted backstory, which is hackneyed to the point of self-parody and doesn’t even offer the tangential enjoyment of an original story.

Perhaps the most horrifying part of the movie is Lutz’s acting. She can’t seem to portray anything resembling a personality and is so cookie-cutter she makes your average 1980s slasher movie character seem nuanced. Johnny Galecki, basically playing Leonard from The Big Bang Theory, is criminally underused in his roughly 40 minutes of screentime, robbing us of the only remotely interesting character.

Rings just shouldn’t exist. It’s a completely unnecessary sequel to an irrelevant series. At two hours long, the film’s narrative lacks any departures from formula that can justify its padded-out plot. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that a January horror film was this terrible. However, I’m frustrated it doesn’t embrace the clearly better narrative that would address just how horrifying Samara’s evil would be in our interconnected digital world. For shame.

Grade: F

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