Rings” is the newest sequel in what is now “The Ring” trilogy.
When the American version of “The Ring” first came out, back in 2002, many claimed it was a solid horror film in an increasingly cluttered market. When I first saw it, I firmly believed it was the scariest movie I had ever seen. At this point, however, there have been a couple that have trumped it, but I still believe it was one of the better horror movies I have ever seen.
Unfortunately, to no one’s surprise, the same cannot be said about “Rings.”
“Rings” features Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz as Julia, a young girl who has just graduated from high school. Her boyfriend, Holt (Alex Roe), goes off to college. The two communicate with each other for a while, until Holt begins to get involved in a group of people who have become obsessed with the infamous Ring video that kills the viewer seven days after watching it. Julia travels over to the college Holt is attending, and begins to search for him, as she cannot seem to reach him since receiving a mysterious call from a girl named Skye. What she finds, however, is much different than what she was asking for when she began looking.
One of the movie’s main marketing ploys was the excessive advertisement of the airplane scene in the beginning of the film. This part ends up falling incredibly flat and ends up feeling more like a poorly done action sequence than a scene from a horror movie.
However, the bad start is not really a sign of things to come.
Surprisingly, I did not find “Rings” to be that bad. It is definitely not good, though. The movie is just okay, but based on what I thought it would be like from the trailers, this is a huge improvement.
No one thought this movie would be good. It wasn’t.
But it also was not that bad.
The best parts about the film are the actors, the occasional creepy settings and scenes, and the history behind the movie’s main antagonist, Samara.
Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz does a decent enough job, but the actors that impressed me were newcomer Alex Roe and veteran Vincent D’Onofrio as the blind man who helps the pair out when they are looking for answers.
Once all of those aspects are put aside, what you are left with is a empty, not very scary, shell of a movie.
What made “The Ring” so scary was the detachment from reality, the feeling that no one was safe, and, at any moment, the main character could die.
This is not the case with “Rings.”
Many rules about how to be saved from the video are set up in “Rings,” while in the 2002 original, both the audience, as well as the characters, went in blind.
Alex Roe’s character acts as a kind of safety blanket for the viewer, so whenever he pops up, you know nothing bad is going to happen. While that might make for a more pleasant experience, it also detracts from the movie doing its job: to scare.
While the are not many jump scares thankfully, there are not that many scares in general. It’s just not that scary of a movie. Even with all of the things it has going for it, “Rings” just is not scary enough to warrant any horror movie fan to purchase a ticket to see it.
I would only recommend “Rings” to fans of “The Ring” series and moviegoers looking for a creepy movie with little to no scares.
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