Rings - DVD Review

Starring Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio and Aimee Teegarden.
Written by David Loucka, Jacob Estes & Akiva Goldsman.
Directed by F. Javier Guitierrez.

★

Few things are more frustrating than watching a sequel and knowing - knowing! - that you yourself could have written a better story.

This is basically The Ring 3. Samara is still having her video passed around, but now in a world where people can copy and send MPEGs instead of VHS tapes.

It commits the cardinal sin of horror films. It is never at any point scary. It goes through the motions people jumping when they don't notice someone behind them and whatnot, but it's like no one involved knows why that's scary. It has the feel of watching a live sitcom where the expected laugh-track is broken. This is a horrorcom that pauses for screams that never come. It even has a "twist" that it gives away half an hour before we get to the reveal.

The acting is terrible, the direction is unimaginative, and it's a real shame that they'd take a franchise with potential like this and kill it.

Split is #1 for third week, Rings #2

For the weekend of February 3-5, 2017, M. Night Shyamalan's Split managed to stay #1 for the third week in a row. I hope he and James McAvoy had decent back-end percentage deals because they should make a lot of money from this movie, which had a modest $9 million production budget.

Of the new releases, Rings did best. For it to be yanked out of October and dumped here was the first signal it probably wasn't good. Its current 5% at RottenTomatoes would indicate it's going to disappear fast from theaters.

The Space Between Us was originally going to open in August, then December, and now finally here. Its 18% RottenTomatoes score tells me it'll disappear even faster than Rings.

Robert DeNiro's labor of love, The Comedian, opened on less than 900 screens and it still had a lower per-screen average than The Space Between Us.

Of the holdovers, Oscar darlings Hidden Figures and La La Land are still finding audiences. I'm rooting for Arrival to cross the $100 million domestic mark; it'll probably get there once it hits more discount theaters.

Where the current nine best picture nominees stand:

Hidden Figures - $119.4 million
La La Land - $118.3 million
Arrival - $98.64 million
Hacksaw Ridge - $66.36 million
Fences - $52.71 million
Manchester by the Sea - $43.91 million
Hell or High Water - $27.01 million
Lion - $24.71 million
Moonlight - $19.64 million

Opens February 10
LEGO BATMAN MOVIE with the voices of Will Arnett, Zach Galifianakis and Jenny Slate.
FIFTY SHADES DARKER with Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan and Marcia Gay Harden.
JOHN WICK 2 with Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo and Laurence Fishburne.