A Brief Essay on Why "The Ring" Movies Suck

(Okay, spoilers aplenty coming, so if you haven't seen either of "The Ring" movies and wanna be surprised, please look away. Skip down the page. There's a really funny article about ideas for new cartoons, if you haven't seen that one. )

To paraphrase Roger Ebert, I know how to believe stuff when it happens in movies. I believe that a kid on a bike can fly. I believe that if you click your heels together three times, it'll send you back home. I even believe that in New York there's a building with a 7 1/2th floor, and on it is a portal into the head of John Malkovich.

All this, I believe. I cannot, however, even for a second, believe the events of "The Ring" movies.

After much cajoling from Heather, I finally rented the first "Ring" last night. And after seeing it, my immediate reaction was, I had to see the sequel at my theatre (which I did this evening with the lovely and talented Laura Butera). Not because it was so good, I felt I needed to see how it continued. But rather because, I felt that the events it depicted were so inexplicable that maybe the sequel would shed some light onto them, and make them, if not fully believable, at least comprehensible on a narrative level.

No luck. We're left with a horror franchise with no really sympathetic lead character, a not-that-scary scary villain, a ludicrous premise, no real surprises or shocks, and ultimately, little in the way of substantial entertainment value.

Let's start with the premise. I just can't buy it. The movies have explained just enough about Samara and her circumstances to raise more questions, and they've not explained enough to let me forget about it and enjoy the story. I mean, think about it for a second. There's this little girl. She is adopted by this rich couple who breeds horses, then she's strangled and tossed down a well. She gains (or keeps, I dunno) supernatural powers and wants to kill. Now, I ask you, what are the odds that she'll say, "Hmm, why don't I imprint my evilness onto a two minute videotape and when someone watches it I'll kill them seven days later unless they make a copy and show it to someone else?" Um, yeah.

Now, I could forgive this premise. I can forgive a LOT, if the film is entertaining. But, sorry, I don't think either of the "Rings" are. First and foremost, they simply ain't scary. They have some cool ideas and some nifty visuals, but the ideas aren't executed really well and the visuals lean more toward "oh, that's cool" than "yow, I jumped!" The pacing is slow, but not slow-deliberate-and-atmospheric, more like slow-we're-trying-to-stretch-the-running-time.

And I simply could not like the main characters. Rachael, as played by Naomi Watts, comes across less as a sympathetic heroine and more as cowardly and selfish. I mean, end of movie one, she CHOOSES to copy the tape and keep the cycle of death going, all to save her life and the life of her son. She must know that more people will die as a result. How am I supposed to like a character who chooses self-preservation over noble self-sacrifice? Goes against pretty much every narrative standard ever. Her son Aidan is a more interesting character, but not interesting enough to make up for it. And the male lead in each movie might as well be wearing a sign, "Hi! I'm gonna die!"

The least you can say is that in neither film do the characters come off as unintelligent. No sir. In fact, they make some astonishing deductions, given the path of information they must take. I mean, given what she's been told, read, learned, seen, held, and felt in her experiences in movie One, I STILL have no flipping idea how she made the logical jump that made her understand that she had to copy the tape to save Aidan's life. And how, when trapped in the dream world/TV world/Samara's head/whatever at the end of Two, she figures out that if she closes the lid to the well in this dream world, it means that Samara will be gone forever. These are logical leaps that Agatha Christie would have found implausible. (And speaking of wells...I must have missed something, but wasn't the well that Samara was thrown into on her folks' property? How the hey did it end up under the floor boards of that cabin, then? And what a coincidence that the same cabin where the well was located was checked into by the kids who watched the tape, huh? What if they'd checked into #11? Climax is kinda shot to hell, isn't it?)

What it comes down to is this, I think...horror has hit a snag. Ever since the "Scream" movies hit it big, we as a culture are starving for new horror concepts, particularly ones where the rating can be PG-13, so the pre-teen set can go. "The Ring" has an easy-to-grasp premise (on its surface, at least), some cool visuals, just enough gore to count while not enough to get an R, and enough scares to scare the easily scared. Hence, it becomes a modern horror hit, and potential franchise. All this I can understand, and really, it's all harmless enough. If I still seem annoyed, maybe it's because I am still haunted by the presence of Michael Myers, the eyes of Linda Blair, the sight of Mike standing in the corner, the dread of the ending of "The Vanishing" (the original version, not the cr@ppy Hollywood remake). In all these, I find true horror, universal horror, the fear that the best movies can produce, the kind of fear that can make you feel all the more alive from having experienced it. "The Ring" films, by contrast, are, at best, lightweights.