The Horrible Horror

The+Horrible+Horror

By Ekaterina Zelenin, Staff Writer

Moviegoers should stay clear from 2017’s dreadful catastrophe titled Rings.

The third installment in this interlocked franchise has its horror fans horribly disappointed with its unoriginal plot and terrible attempts at jump scares. With a gruesomely boring story-line revolving around the never ending curse of a ghost, Rings bows down to its significantly better predecessors as it continually reuses The Ring and The Ring 2 scenarios, shots, and even death scenes.

The “new” plot of Rings also centers around the same idea. People watch a creepy tape of a dead girl and have seven days to show it to someone before they die. The new installment tries to show that by now, people have caught on, and there a network exists in a college basement that transfers the videos to new people each time, thus creating a chain of viewers, and preventing their deaths.

The intention of the director is admirable, as he tries to convince the audience that the network is somewhat successful. In reality, the likelihood of the cohesively assembled team believing in the curse and being eager to help is far from plausible. Despite the supposed popularity of the video on the internet, it seems highly improbable that the network would expand so greatly in the course of a few months as shown in the movie. This, however, is only part of the plot’s problem.

With a meager seven percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, Rings completely derails from its original source material when it introduces its main hero as someone who is “destined” to help the ghost of Samara find her peace. The movie’s slow pace drags on as the main character, Julia, and her boyfriend Holt watch the tape and try to uncover Samara’s tragic past.

The audience is then faced with about an hour of mystery uncovering mixed with only slight glimpses of repetitive and non-frightening horror. It seems at one point as though the viewer has begun watching an episode of Sherlock Holmes or rather the silly child cartoon series Scooby Doo.

Furthermore, the revelation at the end is not surprising at all. What could have been a chilling climax turns out to be quite predictable and overdone. The film’s conclusion gives its style no credit, and the story concludes as absurdly as it began. Although the film had some capturing visuals, the overall presentation makes it a dull and unexciting passerby horror flick.

After viewing the movie, WHHS Junior Michele Vida stated, “Some parts of the movie were actually thrilling when you thought the movie was going to go somewhere. However, after those points, it didn’t. I was disappointed with its awful, boring ending.”