Imagine it's a Saturday night in 2002, you're nine years old and on a family outing. Your father always let's you and your siblings pick the film, no matter the rating, and as a group you decide to watch a horror flick. After watching The Ring, you're scarred for life. You unplug your television every night for the next three years in fear a little girl about your age will come out and stare you to death. Yes, stare you to death. You harbor such an irrational fear of Samara Morgan and her well-climbing ways, but it's okay, you were only nine-years-old.
Three years pass, and at twelve, you're on the brink of your teens. Nothing can scare you now. Right? You're already starting to overcome your fear of little girls and wells altogether. Wrong! Imagine it's another Saturday night, this time in 2005. To your complete and total dismay, your siblings have to see the sequel. Thus, The Ring 2 careens you into another 3-5 years of television unplugging, soap in your eyes during showers and intense staring into the dark at what you pray is your jacket hanging in the closet. By this point, you are forever going to fear the little girl you've outgrown.
At the ripe, old age of twenty-four, you've become quite the horror fanatic. Nothing really scares you anymore. You've seen all the disturbing films and YouTube videos that your tolerance is above and beyond the norm. Maybe you've simply outgrown the genre, but likely, you're just highly desensitized. So, when you hear about sequel number three to the one film that left a scar so deep you still have a pep in your step when caught in the dark, you must go and see it.
The Ring was the American interpretation of the Japanese film Ringu. The story was chilling and uncomplicated: family adopts baby girl, girl is evil, mother throws her down a well, girl survives for seven days, girl lives on through killer video tape and viewers will be subject to girl crawling out of their television to stare them to death. If this sounds complicated to you, you'll never get your head around the third installment to this franchise. The original starred talent like Naomi Watts as lead and Daveigh Chase as none other than the wicked Samara Morgan. Doesn't she look just adorable?
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| Daveigh Chase | Samara Morgan | Naomi Watts with Chase |
This horror franchise relied solely on the age in which it was made. Today, we don't have VHS tapes. We don't have landlines. The 2005 sequel saw this arising issue and decided to stick to the backstory, but Rings took itself a little too seriously. Not only did the 2017 addition try to extend the backstory, but it made a reaching attempt to salvage what made it's successors so terrifying: the concept. What could be more frightening than the idea that our technology might be as damning as revolutionary? While I think it's a little far-fetched to attribute this ideal to such a film, at least The Ring was thought-provoking. The story was full of twists and suspense, however, all of our burning questions about Samara Morgan and her killer video tape were answered. There needn't be a second, and much less, a third.
No. Get out of here with that. Samara isn't bias. She kills every one with the same tape. She doesn't discriminate. There's no telling how much work went into making the first. Just, no.
Now, Samara can get you anywhere. There are multiple screens in our homes, in public places, even in our hands. This is a major issue to the story itself. Without a doubt, if the killer video made it's way to the internet (as it did in this film) it would be shared millions of times within a matter of hours. Phones would be ringing off the hook, but would people be dropping like flies? The whole concept is if you share it before the seven-day grace period, you're golden. Somehow, someway, this logic was unfounded in the film. While not all horror movies are allowed logic, as X wouldn't happen if Character A hadn't ran up the stairs instead of down, this is enough flawed logic to span at least 15 horror flicks. In fact, I was unsure if I was watching something from the Final Destination film franchise when the film opened.
This film received a 7% from Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.5/10 from IMDB. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Go watch the first movie, skip the second and pretend the third was never birthed into existence. If you're the type to go for the unsettling, brooding sort of horror, definitely give The Ring a chance. There's nothing like watching Samara climb out of the well for the very first time. It still haunts me to this day. It's a perfect blend of horror and storytelling through both sounds effects and cinematography. As for Rings, I'll give this movie props for only two things: it's clever marketing strategy, and this fraction-of-a-second sequence from the film. Both are pictured below:
After reading this, if you'd like to see the trailer, the links for each film in the franchise are below. Fair warning, the trailer for the film reviewed entails all the best parts. It is an inaccurate depiction of how good this film is not.
Trailers:
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