From the “why now?” file, we have the third installment in a horror franchise that has been dormant since 2005. I haven’t seen the first two movies since they first came out, but I remember thinking that The Ring is quite good. The Ring 2 is awful but is totally worth it for the deer attack scene, which is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious things ever put on film. Such vague memories are far more than what will stay with me about Rings, though. I was watching this movie 24 hours ago and I am already struggling to remember it. To summarize briefly: Rings is boring. It is painfully, mind-numbingly boring.
In a way, it makes a lot of sense to bring this series back now. With modern social media and the virality of media spreading online like wildfire, it would probably only take one jackass posting the Ring video online to wipe out half the world’s population. Samara, our killer ghost, would have to hire assistants to help manage the sheer volume of murder appointments she would have on any given day. None of that matters, though, because this movie takes advantage of none of it. Johnny Galecki plays a college professor that is studying the ring video and using students as test subjects for documenting what happens after you watch the tape. Before a student’s seven-day deadline arrives, another student will watch it to save the previous one, and so forth. This could actually be an interesting set-up, but the movie explains practically nothing about what he is doing. I spent as much time writing these sentences as the film does explaining what this dude is trying to do. As a quick aside, this guy’s laboratory (I think) looks more like a freaking nightclub than a college facility, which loud music and multiple TVs and students seemingly just hanging out and partying. Speaking as a college administrator, somebody seriously needs to have a talk with this dude about proper usage of his funding.
Instead of following that story, we get to follow some girl as our main character as she goes looking for her missing boyfriend, who is one of Galecki’s students. I don’t remember either of these character’s names and the roles are performed with the enthusiasm of an insurance expo, so I’ll just call them Girl and Guy. So, Girl sees a version of the video that is slightly different from the version everyone else sees, so they think she is special or something. Then Girl and Guy decide to go investigate the video’s origins for some reason. After what feels like about 8 hours of them walking around and periodically finding a jump scare (including a quick shot to an umbrella opening, truly nightmarish stuff), Girl and Guy oddly stumble upon the plot of Don’t Breathe in progress. Turns out that Samara’s origin involves a blind, psychotic priest that impregnated a woman and then kept her chained up in the basement. And Samara is trying to be reincarnated in Girl’s body…. I think. After a while, you forget that you’re even watching a Ring movie because Samara shows up so rarely.
I spent most of this film trying to make sense of the timeline. Assuming it is a sequel to the previous films, even though the events of those films aren’t mentioned, much has happened since the CGI deer tried to inherit the earth in part 2. Samara’s body was taken out of the well for some reason by somebody and then put into this town’s cemetery. That caused a flood to destroy the town because….reasons. Then Don’t Breathe priest guy took her body and stuck it in the wall of his house, again presumably for reasons. This all must have taken quite a long time and Samara has still clearly been active while all this happened, so she doesn’t seem to care about any of it. By the end, I still hadn’t made sense of it, but I think I devoted more time and thought to the subject than the writers did.
I can’t even muster the enthusiasm to be angry at this thing. It is inept in every way, from catatonic performances to cinematography that makes even daytime scenes look like they were shot underwater in the dark, but it isn’t even a fun kind of bad. It’s just a thing that played on a screen for what seemed like 12 hours while my mind darted from topic to topic, occasionally remembering that I was supposed to be watching a movie. Don’t watch this movie unless you are having trouble sleeping, and even then I would recommend hitting yourself in the head with a hammer instead. At least then you would feel something.
Image By: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/Rings_-_Official_Theatrical_Poster.png
