Directed by F. Javier Gutierrez
Starring Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio, Aimee Teegarden and Bonnie Morgan
These days, it takes quite a bit for me to actually watch a movie in a theater. As I've said before, my town (of 13,000 people) has no theater. Seeing a movie in something other than single-screen places that remind me of the flooding scenes from The Poseidon Adventure involve something like a 40-minute drive, but a new Ring movie? I'm there. Thus, a little over a week ago, I made the trek across the border into deepest, darkest Iowa to check this one out. And...it sucked.
First things first, I'm a HUGE fan of this franchise. The original Ringu from Japan is one of the scariest and best horror movies I've ever seen, and the official sequel Ringu 2 and prequel Ringu 0: Birthday are both very badass in their own right. Jumping Stateside for the American series, I would probably rank the 2002 film The Ring at #3 only behind John Carpenter's The Thing and David Cronenberg's The Fly in the "Best Remake of All Time" discussion. Those two movies are actually better than the original films; The Ring isn't QUITE as good as Ringu, but it's damn close. And The Ring Two...yeah, it's pretty bad, but I actually love it for all the wrong reasons. CGI Deer Attacks FTW. So when it comes to Sadako, Samara and impenetrable webs of mystery based around cursed videotapes, I'm as nerdy as it gets and I was very eager for a new installment in this series. Unfortunately, it's everything that's wrong with modern horror movies rolled up into one convenient, extremely crappy package. Since this review would be pretty damn boring if I ended it with this history lesson, let's get into the reasons why this flick is a huge let-down.
What we have here is one of the most ridiculous sequences out of the gate that I've seen from any horror movie in a good long while. If for some reason you're reading this and AREN'T familiar with the premise of The Ring, it goes like this - there's a videotape that spells death in 7 days for anyone who watches it, as this tape is cursed by the spirit of Samara Morgan. Samara is kind of a mix of Linda Blair from The Exorcist and, I dunno, that bathtub lady from The Shining, an evil girl who was shoved down a well and killed by her own family who now haunts the rest of the world through this damn tape. So where is this going? Well, one of the passengers on this plane has watched the tape. We get that lovely bit of exposition, and then the whole plane going down as Samara cuts down everyone on it. It's nowhere near as cool as it sounds, believe me.
From here, we're launched a couple years into the future into the main plot. The guy who watched the tape is having an estate sale, where an old VCR ('memba those?) and a copy of the tape are up for sale. Said items are purchased by Gabriel (Johnny Galecki, a.k.a. Leonard from The Big Bang Theory), a college professor who immediately fixes up the ancient equipment and watches it. For what it's worth, Galecki isn't too bad in this, sleepwalking only 20% of the time and actually making me forget that he's on my least favorite sitcom of all time. And as we meet the main characters, I found myself wishing that the whole film was about this character.
Oh boy, the main characters. Yes, folks, it's time to meet Holt (Alex Roe) and Julia (Matilda Lutz), incredibly cookie-cutter and cardboard cutoutty college-age kids who will serve as Protagonist A and Protagonist B for the remainder of the film. Holt attends college at the same school that Gabriel teaches at, while Julia is staying behind at home to care for her sick mother (a plot device that immediately gets forgotten the second that it's inconvenient). And that's pretty much all the character development we get for these two yutzes. I really wanted to care about these two, but when their paper-thin characterizations are combined with actors that were either bad or didn't give a f**k, I tuned out of this flick for long stretches thanks to these two. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Time for this plot to unspool. Soon enough, Julia notices that Holt isn't responding to her calls or Skypes, and goes to the college looking for him. What she finds is that almost everyone in Gabriel's class has watched this mysterious videotape and passed it around (Ring factoid for newbies: you save yourself in these movies by making a copy and showing it to somebody else). The first third of the movie actually builds up to this really nifty scene as one of the students bites it at the hands of Samara. From that point on, everything takes a bigger nosedive than anything we've seen thus far.
Coming into Rings, I had high hopes for a lot of reason. For starters, I'm absolutely sick of the ghost movies that dot the landscape these days, and I was ready for a flick that gave us a true-blue ghost that KILLS motherf**kers, onscreen and preferably in grisly ways. And nobody does this better than Japan and the movies based on them. Since this is the third movie in a series, the next logical step seemed to be escalation in the form of technology. Namely, Samara going viral. Well, this DOES happen at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), but what we get for most of the runnin time is Holt and Julia doing their best Scooby and Shaggy impersonation in Samara's birth town looking for her skeleton because...reasons. Something about burning her body to set her soul free and save their hides. For a third film, the stakes feel criminally low, especially since we care so little about these characters.
For an indicator of what we're dealing with, the big crux of the film involves Holt and Julia finding a former Priest played by Vincent D'Onofrio who went blind conveniently around the time that Samara's body was moved back to her hometown. Red herrings much? D'Onofrio is an awesome actor, and he gives it his all to this role, but this character is essentially your "meddling kids" Scooby Doo character, and I don't think I'm spoiling a damn thing by making that reference. Again, don't say I didn't warn you.
What else is there? Oh, boo scares aplenty. This is definitely my biggest issue with modern horror movies. I watch horror movies because I like to be frightened. Like, the kind of frightened where the hair on my neck rises and I find myself thinking about the stuff for days afterwards. Big-studio horror movies tend to forego this and just startle us by doing the equivalent of dropping loud books on a table right in front of our ear. Boy, does this movie like doing that. And that, my friends, is what you call film criticism. And the ending? It telegraphs itself a mile away like a jab from Glass Joe, and really just made me again wish that the whole film had been about freakin' internet videos instead of mysterious hometowns, crypts, and jump scares.
Really, I think this whole project is just a shame, because it's been 12 years since The Ring Two and I thought there was a legit chance to reignite this franchise. Let's just say that the movie had started with the Galecki character finding the tape...and then passing it around the internet as a means of saving his own skin as well as anybody else who happened to watch it. Only a few kids didn't quite grasp that concept, thus leaving it up to Galecki and a few of his students (preferably played by people who decidedly have a pulse) to track them down and try to save their lives only to catch Samara's eye personally. Only since she is now on the great, grand interwebz, anything goes. That would have been raising the stakes, modern, maybe even a little scary, and way less hokey and cliched. Instead, we got...this. I can't recommend Rings, kids, and that's a real pity, because there was some big-time potential here to bring this awesome "play with matches and you get burned" story to the next generation.
* 1/2 out of ****. It's got one really great scene and Vincent D'Onofrio doing his damndest. Other than that, avoid this one like...well, Samara.
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