When will Hollywood learn to let go of series' and stories that have no juice of being resurrected? After a decent two-part horror series of Ring, the makers decided to play again on the same franchise leading to an extremely boring film. Director F Javier Gutiérrez, does include few 'modern' touches but even those lead to a predictable and lazy plot.
The story involves the same old tape, only this time the upgrade has been made from VHS to digital file. Samara, the terrifying spirit of the girl has re-coded her curse and it now haunts anybody who watches the tape and fails to show it to some other person within 7 days.
Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) a college professor who’s gotten hold of the classic old-school Ring videotape is in the midst of an experiment that involves showing it to a bunch of college kids, all to provide scientific evidence for the existence of the soul or the gateway to the other side. The way the rules now work- if your seven days are up but you make a copy of the tape and show it to somebody else, you’ll survive and they will die.
Julia (Matilda Lutz), after a disturbing Skype conversation with her boyfriend, Holt (Alex Roe), trails him to college, where she discovers that he’s one of Gabriel’s guinea pigs. Then it all gets turned into internet horror-mentary as the tape gets converted into digital files, and it also becomes a case of video-within-the-video. In this one, there’s a new set of flickering images — church flood, burning corpse, cicadas in the shape of a crucifix, a snake eating its tail. But the new images aren’t all that different from the old images in reality.
The images turn out to be clues to a mysterious disappearance, which leads Julia and Holt to Sacrament Valley, the kind of quaint small town that has a dark secret and then begins a series of horror-drama clichés. Rings takes the Ring formula and merges it with the premise of 2015's Room, with its fusion of depravity and victimisation. Just get the hint that if the kid in the Room wouldn't have made out into the world, his fate would have been quite similar to Samara.
The first two instalment of the film managed to get us all spooked out due to its content and of course the black water, greyish spirit. However, the new one fails to even evoke a single scare. The director manages to use the quotient of 'jump-scare' often but the sad timing ruins it all. There comes a point when you actually want to go inside the film and wake everybody up urging them to at least give you one chilling scene.Believe us when we say that an episode of Black Mirror is more horrifying than this supposed horror film.
The movie, isn’t scary, doesn't live up to the legacy, and it doesn’t nudge you to think of technology in a new way. But it does make you wish that you could rewind those two hours, or maybe just erase them and go for original Japanese Ringu instead.
A dud in all form, Rings disappoints.
Rating:1.5/5
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