Rings (2017)

So before I begin, I would like to warn all of my readers out there that my copy of this film may be haunted. When I first took the plastic off of it the other day (it was brand new,) I discovered that a thin, oily substance had saturated the paper insert inside the Blu-ray case, and the back of both discs within. So, I cleaned them and made the best of it, but I find myself more than a little freaked out by this. I tried to return it to the Amazon seller that sold it to me, but wouldn't you know it: they no longer exist.

Apparently, according to Google, this is actually a common occurrence: something called outgassing, and entire little communities of weirdo Blu-ray collectors out there spend their every waking moment on forums discussing the best way to combat it and how to keep their archives in the best shape possible so that they'll still be around even when their bones have long since turned to dust, but the more you know, I guess? I'm very inclined to just go with the haunting story instead.

Considering it's been twelve years since the last attempt to make a sequel to Ringu (or in this case, its lesser American remake,) Rings has some mighty shoes to fill. But surely, it must have something special up its sleeve to resurrect the series after such a long hiatus? 

Well, let me just say this: it's a good thing the packaging itself gave me such a fright because Rings is only frightening in the sense that a lot of people were paid good money and given plenty of time to throw together such a dumpster fire of a film. I would try and save my opinion for later but my god. I went in knowing it would be bad, and it certainly lived up to that, but this bad? Really? 

How do you fumble an inherited idea so badly while simultaneously wallowing in the original, proving that you ought to know better? How could you make into a teen slasher what was once considered the death knell of that entire genre? And most importantly, how could you turn out what feels like a cheap Final Destination movie when those films ripped your franchise off in the first place?! Well, I don't know how they did it, folks, but Sony made that shit happen. All of it, and then some. It almost feels like a film that isn't meant to be watched at all: only purchased and viewed 'in the background' by horny teenagers eager for any place to park themselves away from parental supervision.

So here's the plot: TV's Johnny Galecki is an evil professor who decides to run a little experiment on his student populace. He starts spreading Samara's cursed videotape around to his students, presumably just to see what will happen, and predictably, it quickly begins to wreak havoc on the campus. And then the world's most forgettable teenage protagonists show up and I start feeling more than a little sleepy. The narrative tries adapting all the worst ideas from the 2005 short film Rings (little groups that abuse the video to get a sort of 'high' or, as here, gain some kind of insight into the afterlife,) combining them with random ideas from Spiral (the evil college professor carrying out Samara's wishes,) and then mixing all of that with a big ole helping of fan service and it just doesn't work.

Take any cool image or idea from the original Ringu. Hell, take even little touches that barely registered as anything special, and you can bet it's copied here. They grasp for anything familiar they can to remind you of the vastly superior film they're aping rather than attempting to expand on it or throw something new into the mix. Flies, swarms of cicadas, millipedes, water falling up, and just water in general: it's all here, and the film really wants you to notice it and be transported back to the salad days of the franchise and most certainly avoid paying attention to the fact that the screenplay for this new film is either a few different ones duct-taped together or totally nonexistent.

The 'investigation' that drives the plot is laughable and full of mumbo jumbo that would give Koji Suzuki a run for his money (did you know that video data can be 'stored' in still images?) The dialog, as you'd expect from a movie meant for teenagers, starring mostly young people (and a few forty-year-old "college students") yet written by a bunch of aged suits in a board room somewhere up at Sony HQ, is atrocious. It sounds horribly flat at the best of times and ought to embarrass whoever wrote it. But they don't just get human beings and their speech wrong, no sir. The 'creative team' behind this trainwreck also seems to misunderstand the very basics of how horror films work. There's no atmosphere here, no subtlety, no fake-outs; only cheap, ineffective jumpscares. One after another, coming from anywhere and anything. It should make you paranoid, but it doesn't. It's just exhausting.

*spoilers begin*

And then there's the awful ending. Like in Spiral, Samara is rebirthed. Only here, she's reborn metaphorically, and our teenage heroine somehow gets tricked into transforming into her rather than becoming pregnant with her, which I would say is definitely not a positive change. The final image in a spooky horror film shouldn't make you laugh, but that's exactly what happened here. Or at least it would have had I not been so angry that I'd just wasted nearly two hours of my precious time on Earth watching this drivel.

*spoilers end*

Technically, this film fares no better. The visuals are empty imitation and the editing always has its eyes on the clock, cutting generally too fast and never allowing any one thing room to breathe. But that stuff is subtle compared to the awful CG effects work. Riddle me this: how is it that all these repeated effects that looked great in a film from 2002 look so much worse in a film from 2017? It doesn't help that the sound design is so cookie-cutter and cheap, full of loud stock banging sounds and the most beige film score you'll ever hear. 

But the most damning technical issue by far is that the performances are uneven as fuck. Johnny Galecki seems half asleep or possibly drunk as he mumbles and slurs his words, our lead has no charisma and was obviously chosen for her looks rather than her ability, ditto her supermodel boyfriend. Vincent Donofrio is the one bright spot, as he seems to be having fun with the material and making the best of his clumsy villain dialog, but besides feeling a sort of general approval that he enjoyed himself, there's not much nice to say about his character or his role in the alleged plot of Rings.

The end result of all of this corporate popcorn bile is that I was mostly bored and had a lot of trouble seeing it through to its end. I keep going back to a review I read somewhere that claimed that the film was better than its made-for-teens marketing would suggest, which I feel the need to unpack. In exactly what way did this not feel like a made-for-teens makeout film? It practically has everything I hate about horror films marketed to teens and designed to be forgotten a few years after they are released. With a ghastly narrative that will offend fans of the original almost as much as it'll bore them silly thanks to extensive recapping and repeating of franchise trademarks, all with a presentation that screams "SONY PICTURES!" Rings may add up to the worse film I've ever sat through, which isn't too shocking considering that I usually avoid obvious disposable trash like this, but it's still something worth condemning or celebrating, depending on your perspective.