Hallowatch 2026 No. 9: Rings (2017)
If you or a loved one has been a graduate student forced to edge death by watching DEATH_TAPE_DO_NOT_WATCH.MOV, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
I like the aspect of The Ring movies where you see a video that makes you question your own reality and that's what kills you. It's neat how it's a predecessor to screenlife movies like that. This one is a stinker though. Not a total stinker, it's not utterly devoid of interesting things, but it's a stinker.
Wikipedia link for the synopsis. Spoilers, etc follow.
This occupies a strange space and feels like it has little respect for the source material; it seems to think the space laid out for scares with Samara-shenanigans is too narrow so it makes it Final Destination and The Amityville Horror and more than a little 10 Cloverfield Lane, while setting it inside Flatliners. You may say, wow, that's a lot of mashups, how did they manage that? By removing all the characterization that movies usually give their characters, of course!
No for real though, this is a goofy dud of an entry; I wish there was a version of it that attempted the same maneuver as Ring 2 [🇯🇵], where the curse just flat-out resisted schematicization and thus science is useless in defense against it. It's a really hard narrative maneuver to pull off at the budget that most of these films are made at so it's usually ends up with clunky Roland Emmerich dialogue for why the science doesn't work but the ultimate gist is that the circumstances of the movie have unleashed something uniquely poisonous into the world, and that bell can't be un-rung, but it also can't be re-rung. The circumstances that made it happen are without precedent before or since. A rogue wave.
Instead, we get Answers. This is a poison all its own, I guess, because when you know how something happens you can rationalize your way around all kinds of mechanical tomfoolery about how to deal with the girl who comes out of the teevee, etc. Here's why she's Like That - it was because her mom was raped by a priest. Here's why X Y Z, it's because T U V and W. It might be tragic; it's might even be horrific; but it's rarely scary, to have it happen to the antagonist, and usually defuses tension as the audience stops and re-runs through all the evental objects the film has put into its narrative.
Things I did like:
- Alex Roe from Bone Lake is here. Hello Alex.
- Vincent D'Onofrio might be the only actor working presently who can pull off a cover band version of the Scary John Goodman thing.
- The uncanny-ness of Samara is hard to top for me in terms of scariest movie monsters. Her emerging from the flatscreen? That's the good stuff, that's why i'm watchin' the movies!
Would I watch this again? Maybe, with friends, to smirk at it
Would I watch a sequel? No. This just bogs down the concept with useless lore. Maybe if they memory-holed this entry and just did a sequel to the first movie, for a third time.
Would I watch a remake? Only if they stopped and remade the whole franchise.
