★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆
The most immersive moment in Rings – a resurrection of the killer VHS saga – came when the DCP
from which the film was projected cut off, just for an instant. In that deathly
still second, it was almost as if the jittery, unstable nature of the series’
cursed videotape had infected the cinema itself. But then sight and sound
returned, and my sudden immersion was shattered by Vincent D’Onofiro’s blind
priest bellowing so loudly that the scenery he’d been previously chewing flew
from between his teeth and spattered the camera lens.
Besides the basic premise (you watch a weird videotape, you
die seven days later), my experience with this franchise is limited to watching
Gore Verbinski’s The Ring with
several drunk friends who shouted “Non, Gaston!” when Martin Henderson’s
character died (I have no idea why, either), and one of the two funny jokes in Scary Movie 3. Just Google ‘Scary Movie
3 nah I'm just screwing with ya’ and you’ll find the clip, and – by awful, unbelievable
extension – spoil the ending of Rings
for yourself.
In this long-gestating instalment, attractive young couple
Julia (Matilda Lutz) and Holt (Alex Roe) are drawn into the dark world of
Samara’s curse by Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) and his obsession with the tape,
which leads the two on a search for the ghostly girl’s resting place. After
some initial and not entirely unexpected VHS fetishism, the original video goes
digital…because apparently smartphones and e-mail are the ‘hip’ thing for
horror now.
I watched Rings following
my fourth viewing of Rogue One (leave
me alone), and D’Onofrio’s hammy madman is something of an amalgamation of characters
from the preceding film: a sightless religious man blessed with near-supernatural
powers also inherits Forest Whitaker’s prestige beard. The fact my brain even
made this connection is probably an indication that I wasn’t that involved in the film, but, then
again, none of the actors seemed to be, either. I suppose it’s hard to feign
interest in playing the same old horror archetypes that wore out their welcome
even before the first incarnation of the Ringu
legend hit screens in 1998.
The closest resemblance this bears to previous episodes is stylistically; by
which I mean it looks and sounds like a schlocky genre film from early 2000s.
There’s a peppering of fairly smart editing, the lighting leans heavily on
various shades of green and black, and there’s a piano and string score to lend
a cinematic feel that most modern horrors would ditch.
What a shame that more signifiers of the current
found-footage era weren’t left by the wayside. I could maybe forgive the
university students being played by people obviously in their late twenties, or
the bit where it turns into Don’t Breathe
for two minutes. But the boring camerawork, shoddy attempts at tension
building and frightening moments notable only by their absence are a chore to
sit through. Plus (and I know this isn’t his fault), Roe’s likeness to the bargain
basement baby of Dave Franco and Nicholas Hoult is immensely distracting.
An intense and entertaining opening – in which the tape is
played to the inhabitants of an airborne passenger plane – sets us up for
immediate disappointment. The jump-scares (or, rather, ‘scares’, because they’re
all cattle-prod cop-outs) are signposted in skyscraper-high neon lettering, and
so any sense of fear or dread is quickly ejected from this forgettable, tiresome
footnote of a film with all the grace of an ancient VCR spitting out a particularly worn
tape.
