Thrills and chills eerily absent

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This article was published 06/02/2017 (3193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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The movie Rings represents the third time in a month when major studios put out a major release onto theatre screens while largely ignoring the nicety of pre-screening the film for critics. The other two films were Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Underworld: Blood Wars.

Since Rings doesn’t have a colon in the title, we must assume the reason for the screening omission is that studios tend to handle genre movies… gingerly.

In fairness, there’s sound reasoning behind the strategy. Generally, mainstream critics don’t have a lot of respect for the horror genre. So studios are generally content to release the movies and let the fans decide for themselves if it’s worthy.

Our vote on Rings: not worthy. This reboot/decade-later sequel follows a convoluted horror franchise that began in Japan (Ringu, 1998) and was remade for North American audiences (The Ring, 2002). The big problem with Rings is that it diminishes the threat of the original films, even as it tries to replicate their chills.

The designated damsel in distress is Julia (Matilda Lutz), a young woman compelled to intervene when her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe) goes missing while attending college.

The opening scene of the film establishes some background. We see the demonic, video-spawned young girl Samara’s sphere of influence includes people on passenger planes. Airport security means nothing to this double-jointed hellspawn.

A victim’s VHS video — remember, the enclosed art film promises death within seven days to anyone who watches it — lands in the hands of bargain-hunting college biology professor Gabriel (Johnny Galecki).

Yep, Holt happens to be one of Gabriel’s students. Panicked by Holt’s refusal to take her calls, Julia heads to the school and finds herself enmeshed in something like an extracurricular death cult that has sprung up around the video.

Gabriel, still alive weeks after seeing the cassette, has determined the curse is lifted when the victim passes the curse on to someone else. (This is not news for anyone who has seen the original.) Gabriel tries to scientifically suss out the deeper meaning of the menace while glibly putting his own students at risk.

When Julia herself sees the video, the race is on to uncover more information about Samara’s origins as yet unexplored in previous Ring movies.

The investigation takes Julia and Holt to a rainy Washington state village where they elicit the help of Burke (Vincent D’Onofrio), a genial blind man with his own dark insights into Samara’s past.

Director F. Javier Gutiérrez has cobbled together a decent-looking film that makes the most of its doom-laden Pacific Northwest atmosphere. But like the other recent reboot/sequel Blair Witch, while it faithfully replicates the scare tactics of its inspiration, it doesn’t bring anything fresh to the game save a technological upgrade, in this case from VHS to digital.

Especially baffling is Gutiérrez’s choice to pretty much ignore the “clock,” that is: the seven-day countdown meant to layer time-is-running-out anxiety onto the premise.

Possibly, the director realized the clock doesn’t matter because the main characters are two good-looking Stepford millennials with no histories or discernible personalities of their own. Their sheer blankness is almost scary, which is as scary as this movie gets.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing