Well.  This past Friday February 3rd 2017 I was SUPPOSED to go shoot photos for The True Mayhem.  And while the circumstances were entirely out of my hands (thanks Mother Nature/God), I didn’t end up being able to attend the show due to a FREAK FUCKING SNOWSTORM that dropped 3ft of snow on my province in like 24hrs…  and instead I wound up drunk and high at a showing of Rings.

As to the how – well, my sweet mother in her infinite wisdom had given to me a bunch of free movie gift cards, so being the charitable chap that I am, I gathered the DIAG squad and through a raging blizzard we went.

Rigby drove.  We almost died.  It was a real nightmare.  So we got high and staggered inside and sat down and the nightmare..  continued?  Or got better somehow.

I dunno.  There’s only so much that can be said about a fucking 5pm showing of a February horror film in the middle of a blizzard when you had way better plans that night.

So join me for a while as we talk about the sequel that no one wanted to a remake of a way better Japanese film that no one asked for.  Seriously though, I know it’s kinda cool to hate on American remakes but that fucking Ring remake scared the living shit out of me when I was a little guy.

So the movie starts with a dickweed on a plane telling his seatmate that he watched the cursed video tape 7 days ago.  What a thing to tell someone on a plane ride, right?  Please.  For the safety of us and others, if you ever sit beside me on a plane, don’t speak to or even look at me.

Turns out Samara shows up on the flight (bitch didn’t even pay for a ticket, ain’t that some shit), by rising out of the shitter in order to kill the ever loving shit out of the people who watched the tape, and then just for fun, all the little TV screens in the place start showing the cursed Ring video and the plane crashes.

Soooo..  does that like..  count?  Like..  Doesn’t Samara only kill the people who watch her tape?  What?

I think it’s bullshit that she’s just arbitrarily increasing her kill count based simply on convenience.

Anyways, flash forward a few years later and a total forgettable girl named Julia and her googly eyed boyfriend named Holt are banging because Holt is going to college.

Holt, I swear to god had the googliest creepiest eyes I’ve ever seen.  He look like a Siberian Husky mixed with a googly eyed pencil from the dollar store.

I wasn’t complaining when he took his shirt off, but it was a real snooze to watch Julia Ghoulia moisten her pantaloons over this forgettable goon.

Like all long distance relationships doomed to fail, they promise to “Skype” every night.  Look, we’ve all seen Unfriended and it doesn’t end well.  Stay away from Skype!

While Holt tromps off to college to better his education and his beer pong score, Julia does what any self sustaining woman would do – she mopes around at home like a sad sack and texts Holt some high maintenance shit all day and night..

I mean we’ve all been crazy chick, but come on Julia..  Holt isn’t even that hot.  Like.  What are you doin to yourself girl.

After a few weeks/days/hours/minutes of not hearing from Holt, Julie gets a late night Skype call from a freaky ass goth girl and she decides to drive to campus to stalk/look for him.

In the meanwhile it has turned out that a professor from the college named Gabriel (with the name of an angel and the face like a bulldog) bought the cursed video tape out of an old VCR (and here we thought it was just old pornZ), that was sold by the grieving families of the people who died in the plane crash (you know, from before).  Gabriel did what any reasonable person would do and began conducting a crazy experiment in neuroscience because he believed he had discovered “the soul”.  This experiment involved getting people to watch the tape and then passing on the tape to another person, called a “tail” in order to spread the “Samara” enigma.

Now.  First of all.  How the fuck did this dickhead know who Samara was.

Second.  Who sees that shitty art film/cursed tape and thinks that that is the definition of a soul?

I’ll tell you who.  Vegan dudes who ride bicycles and drink only craft beer and talk about maple sriracha and have actually attended film school.  That’s who.

Anywho, Julia rolls up and is all, “hey where’s my boyfriend” and she just wanders into his dorm room all casual like apparently there’s no campus security.  What do we pay student union fees for if not to keep bland looking women out of their boyfriends stinky dorms?  She for whatever reason/device to push the plot forward grabs a random key hanging on the wall, because that’s what the boys love, ladies, when you rifle through their personal belongings.

Really drives the old boner in overdrive when you commit petty larceny.

Anyways Julia decides to go harass Professor Gabriel and follows him to a SECRET ELEVATOR and whoa good thing she has that key so she can get on it and go find the hidden floor of the university where Gabriel is feeding kids LSD, blasting Fever Ray and getting them to watch the cursed video tape.

University.  Am I right?

She discovers that her boyfriend has watched the cursed tape and ends up getting taken to the creepy goth girl’s house who has, for whatever reason, left her finding of a “tail” to watch her copy of the tape until the very last like five minutes of her 7 days.  Julia gets a text from Holt and he urges her to not watch the tape, so she locks herself in the bathroom of the goth girl’s house while Samara shows up and kills the shit out of the goth girl.  Mondays, right?

Anywho.  Shortly after this, Holt Renfrew shows up to rescue his bland babely girlfriend and she’s all, Y U NOT TEXT ME, and seems to care very little that her boyfriend is soon to be killed by an angry little girl ghost (who is very clearly played by a woman, but fuck it)..

So, these two idiots decide to go have a little nap nap and cuddle time, and given that Holt has merely hours left to live, he falls asleep pretty easily, and in order to save his dumb ass, Julia ends up deciding to watch the cursed Ring tape/shitty art film.

So of course she does this and Holt is all NOOOO Y U DO DIS, and then he decides to help her find a “tail” to watch the film and keep it from killing her so they roll out at like 4am to go see Gabriel and they try to copy the tape (by right clicking a file on a macbook which is so much lamer than copying a tape), but can’t because there’s more data on Julia’s file (women always be complicating things).

Anyways, turns out the extra data is a special little short film for Julia to watch, and this bitch must be blind or just stupid because she watches it and the boys are all, “what do you see?” and she just stares open mouthed at the screen and is like, “uhhhh”.  Thinking is hard.

Don’t knock yourself out sweetheart.

Oh and also, Julia got a phone call from Samara and it comes in so hot and fast that it burns a series of little dots into her hand.

Keep this in mind for later (foreshadowing)

Anywho, apparently this dumb art film reveals the location of Samara’s body and the professor theorizes that Samara is telling them that she would like them to find and bury her body/burn her body/put her to rest.

So the pair take off for a shitty little town called Sacrament City..

So this town has been decimated by some variety of Biblical flood which apparently occurs when you plant a cursed little girl in the ground.

The two idiots stay at a local bed and breakfast and for literally no reason other than to move the plot forward, Julia notices a little redhaired girl who has now also been haunting her.  Turns out she’s Samara’s mother, but don’t even worry about this right now.

The chunky lady who looks a bit like that Kim Davis woman is all like, oh that’s my niece who disappeared 30 years ago.

The chunky lady is like 50.  Her niece would have been about 15 when she disappeared before she became Samara’s mother.

Soooo….  ?

What?  Samara is like..  ?  35+?  Damn dude, update that dress..  Also, wasn’t Samara like..  way way younger in the 2001 Ring?  Like..  hadn’t she died only a short time before that film took place?  Look, it’s a hard pill to swallow for me to accept that Samara Morgan is my age ok.

Anywho, enough of that algebra lesson from Hell that broke my brain.

The math don’t add up.

So while rustling around in the town doing nothing, Julia has visions of Evelyn, Samara’s mother, which lead her to explore beneath the church.  In the basement she finds the priest’s rape room where he kept Evelyn after knocking her up following a rape.  Evelyn ended up pregnant with Samara, and tried to kill her.  I assume that Evelyn ended up dying somehow?

Possibly death by priest.

Likely, death by priest.

Oh and while all this is going on, Gabriel figures out what the symbol burned into Julia’s hand means and instead of phoning them to tell them, he phones them to tell them he knows and drives out to see them, and immediately drives off the road and dies.

Anywho.  Julia rolls out to Vincent D’Onofrio’s house and he’s all, “the priest used to live here” and she’s all “cool” and yeah, spoiler alert, he’s the priest and he all tries to kill her and stuff and then the movie goes from being a shitty sequel to a shitty remake right into being a shitty rip off of Lights Out.

Priest D’Onofrio is all trying to kill Julia Ghoulia and Holt rolls up and then they’re all rustlin’ around playing charades, doing their thing and as Priest man is trying to kill Julia, Samara rises out of her phone and reverses the priests blindness (?) in order to kill him, and then Julia finds Samara’s bones in the wall so they take her body to burn it by the lake.

Man, could you imagine if a park ranger showed up part way through?

“WHAT U KIDS DOIN”

“Oh nothing, just burning this clearly plastic Halloween skeleton.”

“Carry on.”

So Julia and Holt go back home to shop for clothes at the Gap and they think they’re all safe and stuff and then while she’s showering after some very likely disappointing missionary position sex, Julia starts vomming and pukes up a hairball (women, right?) and inside it is a fly and an eyeball?  Jesus Christ, The Dark Half, much?

When she looks in the mirror, instead of seeing her boring self, she sees Samara, and somehow by magic magic powers, the Ring cursed video starts being sent to all her contacts on her Macbook and it goes viral online.

DUN DUN DUN.

So.  While I was entertained at least while I watched this, this sequel didn’t really need to happen, no one asked for it, and further, no one really cares.

This movie was weak kneed and kinda bland, but hey if you’re drunk and high and somehow end up with a free ticket, just think, worse things can and will happen to you, so just take the ride.

Also, Javier Gutierezz or whoever made this, please stop.

If you want to hear the aftermath of the DIAG crew watching Rings, we podcasted our thoughts on Episode 4 of the DIAG podcast which you can listen to right here under this shiny hyperlink.