Rings (2017)
Directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez
Julia becomes worried about her boyfriend Holt when he explores the dark urban legend of a mysterious videotape said to kill the watcher seven days after viewing. She sacrifices herself to save her boyfriend and in doing so makes a horrifying discovery: there is a "movie within the movie" that no one has ever seen before.
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3 films that influenced Rings
What critics say influenced Rings
Still, it’s disappointing enough for anyone who enjoyed the 1998 Japanese classic Ringu or either of the American films it inspired, 2002’s The Ring and 2005’s The Ring Two.
A sudden influx of J-horror flooded genre festivals and indie theaters and a wave of early 2000s Americanizations followed, starting with the 2002 hit The Ring and continuing with films like The Grudge, Dark Water, and One Missed Call.
This franchise began in 2002 with a simple but effective premise, lifted from the Japanese film “The Ring": If you watch a video tape, then seven days later, you die.
Much more so than the (justly) forgotten The Ring Two , this belated second sequel is a faded copy of its predecessor, the generation loss evident in everything from its performances to its recycled scares.
2002's " The Ring ," directed by Gore Verbinski, was a uniquely atmospheric and altogether special ghost story, a rare American remake (it was based on the 1998 Japanese film "Ringu") which arguably improved upon the original.
Following the American films The Ring (2002) and The Ring Two (2005) and based on the original series of Japanese novels (by Koji Suzuki) and movies, Rings adds nothing to the franchise's mythology, with the possible exception of updating the old VHS tape to new, digital files that can be played on phones and desktops.
Movies like "It Follows" and "The Bye Bye Man" did far better things with this "chain mail horror" concept.
In conceptualizing how it feels to be inescapably pursued by something that’s embedded in your culture, 2015’s It Follows is a much better sequel to The Ring.
Scripted by David Loucka, Jacob Estes and (eeeeek!) Akiva Goldsman, “Rings” has a few points of overlap with last year’s souped-up “Blair Witch” reboot, as well as the ingenious 2014 thriller “It Follows,” which was similarly predicated on the notion that the hope of salvation lies in other people’s misery.
(The rules are similar to It Follows, a vastly superior horror film from a couple years ago.)
The Ring came to the idea of a deadly curse passed on like an STD long before It Follows, but It Follows finds effective ways to explore the dread weight of that idea, where Rings just tosses it onscreen and moves on.
His cavernous, crowded, underlit college lab is halfway between an underattended rave, and the set of Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners.)