* out of four
Here's a horror sequel to a remake of The Ring. This film, Rings, has been sitting on a shelf for well over a year. So, why has it been collecting dust for so long? Because it's crap. Boring, fright-less, poorly made crap. The studio that bankrolled Rings just waited to dump it in theaters on a weekend with no big competition in hopes that it would do some “sucker business.”
Now, the killer VHS tape has been transferred to a computer file by a college professor (Johnny Galecki) and, I guess to save his own ass, he shows the video to a group of students under the guise of an extra credit experiment. Remember the rules from the original films? If you watch the tape, seven days later an undead girl named Samara (Bonnie Morgan) will come out of your television screen and suck the life force out of you. The only way to avoid certain death is by duplicating the tape and, before your seven days are up, having someone else watch it so it will become their problem. So, back to Rings. Holt (Alex Roe) is one of the unlucky students who watches the video, but his smart and caring girlfriend (Matilda Lutz) soon figures out what in the devil is going on and attempts to save him. They end up going to the creepy small town where Samara was originally murdered. And late in the film, Vincent D'Onofrio shows up in a key but ineffective role. But this entire movie is ineffective.
Rings is poorly acted, scripted and directed, with no suspenseful moments at all. Also, the picture looks drab and gray. Yes, this is a horror movie, but just look at Luciano Tovoli's cinematography in Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) to know that horror films don't have to be colorless.
Don't bother seeing Rings. It's boring and will take you less than seven days to forget it. Actually, probably just seven hours.
