Bored Of The Rings

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The Ring is a film in which a video cassette exists that will send shivers down the spine of anybody that watches it. No, not that homemade sex tape in which Screech from Saved By The Bell supposedly gets a bit of poo on his finger and rubs it above his girlfriend's lip.. something much, much worse. Actually, if we're being honest, I don't think many videos can get much fucking worse than Screech's sex tape, and certainly not the one in The fucking Ring. It features shitty footage of some vaguely surreal and supposedly nightmarish imagery that looks like it was handed in on a lazy day by a particularly pretentious visual arts student. However once this footage has been viewed, things do get scary because soon you'll receive a phone call in which a girls voice simply says “Seven days”. Of course I'd just assume that this is the fucking take-away shop finally calling me back to tell me how much longer my pizza is delayed until delivery. However in the world of the film, it means that you have a week left to live... which if you eat at the same shitty take-away shop I constantly do is probably fucking true all the same.

Anyway, seven days after you've received the call, a young girl will crawl out of your television and leave your body dead and fixed with a facial expression that suggests you died whilst having an orgasm at the bottom of a haunted swamp. Although, considering television also contains the smug smile of Piers Morgan whose face literally looks like a Frankenstein-style mix-and-match of every gaseous twat that you've ever hated, I suppose there are worse things that could crawl out from your screen than a young dead girl. In fact, if anything, the real worry when seeing a young dead girl is that Piers Morgan might still be near by as he allegedly-but-not-really-allegedly attempts to hack her phone in another of his self-serving evil schemes. In the sequel Rings, the above is still all true however it seems that now if you can get somebody else to watch the video then that'll buy you longer than the seven days until death.. for.. some reason... I don't know if this was explained more thoroughly in the previous The Ring Two but considering it came out twelve fucking years ago and was shit, a more extensive recap might have been nice. From what I can gather though, it's basically like an idiot's version of Drag Me To Hell or It Follows in which you want to temporarily pass the curse on. I suspect you could manage that by saying to somebody “hey, wanna watch a shit video?”

You might wonder why people are still watching the haunted tape after all these years, but now that I know that you can rent your own doom out, I can see the appeal. I'm twenty-eight years old.. I've met enough pricks in that time that I could quite happily email the video around and keep myself alive and guilt free for at least a good few years. Anyway, don't worry about any of that shite because the film certainly forgets about most of it quickly e-fucking-nough. In fact, I just quickly googled the plot of the movie to try and have that previous 'pass the curse on' thing better explained, and my findings reminded me of a giant plane crash at the start of the movie that went literally fucking nowhere. I only saw the film about an hour ago. We live in a post-9/11 world. How crap must a film have been for me to have forgotten an explosive aeronautic disaster in the time it took me to drive home and have a quick dump? Well, after that disaster had no impact on the story at all, the film actually begins with a chap about to leave for college as a student.. which was a shock because the prick literally looks like he's in his early fucking thirties. When he said he was leaving for college I assumed he was a teacher and from what I could gather, a particularly thick one. So.. a sports teacher, I guess. Ah well. I suppose he must have that weird ageing disease like Robin Williams had in that shit film Jack, and Rings just failed to explain it, which would certainly be in keeping with everything else in the film.

After it's discovered by his girlfriend that he's watched the haunted video, she decides to watch it too to save him for a week via the whole 'pass the curse on' method, but by also obviously condemning herself forever in the process. Why a person would fucking do this is beyond me, especially considering that her boyfriend is about as dull as the pain in your balls about an hour after you've accidentally sat on them. Considering he looked thirty-five and she looked closer to the age that the character should be, I can only assume that she spent her youth as his kidnap victim and stock-syndrome has kicked in over the years. Not to suggest of course that she's much more interesting than him. When she watches the video, it contains a little extra footage for her which leads her on a detective hunt. And by 'detective hunt', I mean like an episode of Sherlock Holmes that was scripted by a simpleton that's writing only with the individual letters that he finds in the coils of his own pubic hair. When she embarks on her little investigation, the film completely ditches the concept of The Ring and the bollocks about passing the curse on, and simply becomes another cliched slab of shit in which alleged teenagers wander cluelessly but arrogantly around a creepy village whose inhabitants are clearly hiding a dark secret. That secret being that if the actors portraying them don't deliver their lines quickly enough then they'll be fired for being late back to their actual day jobs in the service and prostitution industry. That's two separate industries obviously, although commonalities and empathy will build up between the two over time.

Once the film has decided that it can't maintain this plot thread for much longer, it decides to keep the audience's attention by switching films again and becoming a poor man's version of 2016's Don't Breathe. This is ironic because as the film became more and more boring, I started holding my own breath for as long as I could to check I was still alive, and that this wasn't some miserable purgatory that I'd ended up in. I reckon I can hold my breath for about a minute and a half if I'm really trying to find ways to entertain and challenge myself, and so by keeping track of time like this I was also able to work out how much longer was likely left until the film was over. It's nearing the end that the film shifts gear again, having completely ditched its own set-up at this point, and simply becomes another one of those new social media focused horrors. And by social media horrors, I obviously mean films like Unfriended and Friend Request and not the inevitability of the gamma-ray infused Guinea Pig Donald Trump declaring World War 3 in another of his mad-bastard tweets. I should mention too that there's a twist near the end of Rings that took me a few minutes to realise had been a twist. One character has a shadowy past which was revealed earlier on when we quite literally saw them in a photograph doing what the film thinks is 'the twist'. On the bright-side, this does provoke some admiration from me that the editor and director of the movie decided to stand in solidarity by being as completely shit and incompetent as their writers. Or perhaps they quite literally are just as shit? But that would be a cynical assumption and I'd hate to sound cynical. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.