Delayed Reaction: Rings

The Pitch: I bet The Ring would be even scarier now with all the screens and phones in our lives now.

A young woman tries to stop herself from being Samara's next victim.

The Ring is one of my favorite horror movies. I understand that the Japanese movie it's based on is probably better if not on a technical level then simply because it's the original. I've rewatched The Ring fairly recently, and I know that it's a little cheesy at times and doesn't have perfectly sound logic behind it. I love the movie though. Naomi Watts is a great lead. They cast some great creepy kids for the movie. The haunting imagery is effectively unsettling. The rules of it are simple and the monster (Samara) is sufficiently scary. It helps that when I first saw the movie, I was 16, by myself, at night, watching it on VHS. It may not be a horror classic, but it's everything it needed to be for me.

I admire the attempt to modernize The Ring. There's a lot of fun to be had with the move to digital. There are screens everywhere now. The idea that the curse is passed down through a VHS is nonsense to begin with, so why not digital copies too?

I also like the idea that there would be people trying to scientifically understand the tape. It makes me think back to Oculus. I love when people in a horror movie try to meet the dark force on an intellectual level. If a person in a scary movie is smart, does everything right, and still can't win, isn't that even scarier than "Let's split up"? However, the way Rings tries to intellectualize it is just silly. The level of the operation that Johnny Galecki's professor is running is way too big. Too many people know and too many potential people end up dead. Samara can't be mainstream. The tapes can't move past the point of urban legend or they stop being scary.

The Ring movies have always had the problem of over-explaining. Horror works better when less is known. The first movie is about a reporter getting the curse, so it makes sense that she would be able to find some things out, and even she probably learns too much. The Ring Two is a pointless continuation that muddles the story. Rings tries to plus it up, which just feels like putting a hat on a hat. I balked at the idea of adding to the infamous video. If the filmmakers can't find more to unpack in what's in the video to begin with, then give up. Adding to it is such a cheat. It's like in Halloween IV deciding that Michael Myers can fly too. It's too much. Play by the rules of the game.

Then there's my more general criticism of the movie. The lead girl and her boyfriend are idiots. Most of the plot is driven by one of them doing something inexplicably stupid. Also, I'm deeply disappointed that I didn't get to see Samara crawl out of closed laptop. How was there no shot of a laptop getting force open as a hand emerges from it, followed by the rest of Samara, wriggling out of the screen like she's one of those people trying to shimmy their way through a clothes hanger? In fact, I want to know the rules on mobile devices. Can Samara pop out of an Apple Watch or is that one of the benefits of a closed system: no 3rd party software can hack the system? Is there a minimum screen size required? Do the rules change on an HD screen? Like, I want a 4K TV, but not if it makes it easier for Samara to get me. I've changed enough of my life as it is because of these movies. I already don't answer calls from unknown numbers and refuse to watch videos without thumbnail previews.

Rings had the option to either play it as straight as possible or go completely nuts with the idea. It managed to do neither of those things.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend