This review is setting off my OCD (and I'm not just saying that; I really do have OCD). See, I like to do movie serieses in order, starting (obviously) with the first and moving down the line chronologically. But here we have Rings, the latest installment in a series of American remakes of a Japanese property, and I've not covered any of the American movies and only two of the Japanese - Ringu and Sadako vs Kayako for those keeping score. My brain keeps trying to reboot itself if I think about this for too long. My only solace is that most of the storylines in this series are more or less interchangeable anyway.
Julia and Holt are a typical teenage couple. Holt goes off to college while Julia has to stay home, but she soon becomes concerned for Holt when he stops answering her calls and messages and seems to just disappear. She heads to his college to find him, and discovers that he's become involved is some half-cult, half experiment group that's centered around watching Samara's infamous cursed video tape. After seeing another member of the group die due to Samara's curse when her backup tape watcher doesn't arrive in time, Julia chooses to watch the video for Holt to save him, thus cursing herself. The video reacts to her in a different way than it has to the others though; marking her hand and showing her strange new footage. Convinced that Samara is trying to tell her something, Julia and Holt set off to uncover Samara's origins and maybe lay her to rest once and for all...
Well gee, it sure was good of Paramount and Sony to put out a condensed version of Rings online so that busy people can get to see the film as well. Because if you've seen the trailer for this film, then you've pretty much seen the whole film, or at least the important bits. Even the trailer goes ahead and spoils the film's big "shock" ending (with shock in quotes because even if you missed every one of the movie's clues, if you've ever seen any of the other films then you know how these films tend to end) with a line that isn't even in the actual film. Hell, even one of the movie's posters manages to spoil the ending. Truly, that's some dedication to trolling your audience.
Then again, Rings generally doesn't seem to think too much of its audience in general. Maybe it's because it's a teen horror movie and at 37 I'm not exactly the target demographic any more, but I think that even when I was in that age group I wasn't as stupid as the movie seems to think its audience is. The scene that stood out the most to me as an example of this was when Julia is watching Samara's new and improved video and describing what she sees to Holt and his professor (and incidentally, what kind of Biology professor conducts metaphysical experiments to try and prove the existence of the soul? I'm not even touching how wildly unethical the whole setup is). While she starts off fine, describing the images she sees, she becomes strangely silent and vague the moment a snake eating its own tail appears. It's like the filmmakers just assumed that the audience wouldn't understand that piece of important symbolism so they just kept quiet about it so they could stretch their plot out a little while longer. A similar thing happens with the strange brand on Julia's palm - two separate people both realise what it means, but both deliberately withhold the information for no reason whatsoever.
Rings isn't an entirely bad film though. The opening scene, where one of Samara's victims has his seven days' deadline come up while he's on a plane, is actually quite scary for the idea alone (although I'd love to have heard the black box for that flight), and the film does try very hard to get its scares via some old-fashioned tension and dread instead of falling back onto jumpscares. That's quite impressive, especially for a teen horror. The character of Julia also impressed me, both with her decidedly feminist approach to things (asking why it always has to be the man who rescues the girl in stories like these), and also by reminding me somewhat of Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984 version) with her remarkable determination and awareness, no matter how misguided it might have been. There's also a lot of shots of insects, including a centipede, and a bit where someone coughs up a whole lot of someone else's hair, which of course didn't sit well with me. But most of this is in the trailer, and so the only surprise comes in finding out where in the actual movie they occur. Overall, Rings might have managed to be better if it had simply not blown all its scare spots and plot revelations in the trailer, thus cheating the audience of anything new in the actual film.
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