THE RING 3: NUOVO CAPITOLO DOPO TREDICI ANNI DA 'THE RING'

FLASH MOVIE:

E' inutile dire! E' proprio come sentenzia lei! La malefica e inespugnabile Samara! La 'Crudelia Demon' del VHS: "non finirà mai!". E siamo solo al terzo atto! Ve lo immaginate?! Se ogni volta il finale resta aperto ad un nuovo 'episodio', c'è pure da crederci... che non finirà mai! Sigh! E dire che The Ring 3 dal punto di vista narrativo non è neppure orchestrato male. Un incipit furbo, adatto anche a chi di rings/anelli non ne ha visto neppure uno, dotato di un breve resumè per chi gradisce riannodare la matassa, ma... attenzione, a chiamarlo il terzo sequel di quel che sembra diventata ormai una saga horror. Perché tra le nuove trovate narrative - giusto una manciatella, non di più - scopriamo un padre diverso per la medesima Samara rispetto ai precedenti, e dunque sterzate di trama che non trovano corrispondenza e legami logici tra un atto e

un altro.

Nel The Ring 3 di F. Javier Gutiérrez (giovane regista, sceneggiatore e produttore cinematografico spagnolo), c'è persino un richiamo al carpenteriano In the Mouth of Madness - Il seme della follia (1993) ma è alquanto vago e, soprattutto, molto addomesticato, per non dire annacquato e pronto a dirigersi da tutt'altra parte. The Ring 3 non ha per la verità niente di veramente autoriale e con Carpenter sembra condividere più che altro i naufragi filmici dei 'simulatori' originali, di cui il caso più macroscopico è stato il The Fog di Rupert Wainwright (2005), con giovani interpreti più annebbiati della stessa nebbia assassina da cui avrebbero dovuto difendersi. Stessa cosa per The Ring 3, in cui la protagonista Julia (Matilda Lutz) e il suo fidanzatino in età da college Holt (Alex Roe) seguono un copione di assurda e improbabile temerarietà in ogni circostanza. Del tipo da infilarsi in loculi

cimiteriali senza battere ciglio o inoltrarsi in ogni dove senza neppure fare finta di avere un pò di paura, per il trionfo dell'inespressività monocorde. E' per questo che The Ring 3 si lascia guardare come un intrattenimento commerciale tranquillo - il che per un horror movie non è certo un pregio! - carico di simboli visti e rivisti, inzuppati in una trama che, se ha almeno tentato un qualche appeal narrativo, lo ha poi lasciato andare velocemente al suo destino, come è ad esempio il caso del personaggio dell'ex prete cieco Burke di Vincent D'Onofrio. Per i patiti del genere una consolazione: intorno all'immortale e implacabile Samara, di anelli ne seguiranno tanti quanti vorrà collezionarne la produzione cinematografica di turno perché, come ben si sa, un pop corn tira l'altro.

Nearly 20 years after 'Ringu,' the latest American horror sequel of hex, flies, and videotape is as unscary as it is out of date.

“Rings,” the latest franchise horror sequel that has no organic reason to exist, opens on an airplane, where a dude asks the young woman seated next to him, “Did you ever hear about the videotape that kills you after you watch it?” By now, the most appropriate response to that question would be, “What’s a videotape?” Instead, she listens politely as he jabbers on about the tape and the phone call you get after you watch it, the one that says you have only seven days to live. He then explains that he’s five minutes away from powering through those seven days. Uh-oh! Moments later, his nose is bleeding, insects are buzzing, the black sludge is oozing from the bottom of the bathroom door, and

— oh, yes! — the plane is crashing. (All that’s missing is a gremlin on the wing of the plane.) This is how you die in “Rings”: Decisively, accompanied by a great many omens, most of which probably don’t mean very much. But about that videotape…

“Ringu,” the celebrated Japanese horror movie that started it all, was released in 1998 (“The Ring,” the not-bad American remake, came out four years later), and back then, VHS tapes — not to mention teenybopper-voiced phone calls of death placed on landlines — didn’t come off as a form of technology ancient enough to have been used in Druidic rituals. At the time, DVDs were coming into vogue, but this wasn’t just a matter of which format people were going to use to watch stuff at home. The whole category of J-horror played off the fusion of ancient spirits and digital technology — the ghost

in the machine — and “Ringu” used its sinister flash-cut black-and-white videotape, with its twitchy pulsating images that looked like “Un Chien Andalou” turned into a snuff film, as a metaphor for the insidious menace of technology itself. It was a dawn-of-the-Internet-age horror film, and it put forth the message that the future wouldn’t bury the past — it would re-code it.

All of that seems so long ago and far away. The tech revolution is no longer The Scary Exciting Future. It’s simply the air we breathe. And so “Rings,” the third entry in the American “Ring” franchise (after “The Ring” and “The Ring Two”), is just a blah generic ghost story that’s half-heartedly built around the premise of a videotape that kills. It’s now the file-share that kills. I don’t know why that’s less threatening, but it is, kind of like seeing your favorite album cover reduced to a

digital postage stamp.

Johnny Galecki, from “The Big Bang Theory” and “Roseanne,” is cast against type as Gabriel, a surly college professor who’s gotten hold of the classic old-school “Ring” videotape — woman combing her hair, seaside rocks, lone housefly, slithery centipede, woodland meadow, girl with face draped in body-length black tresses dragging herself out of a stone well — and is in the midst of an experiment that involves showing it to a bunch of college kids, all to provide scientific evidence for the existence of the soul, or the gateway to the other side, or something. The way the rules now work, if your seven days are up but you make a copy of the tape and show it to somebody else, you’ll survive and they will die (unless they do the same thing, etc.), making this the Ponzi scheme of living-dead videos.

Julia (Matilda Lutz), after a disturbing Skype

conversation with her boyfriend, Holt (Alex Roe), trails him to college, where she discovers that he’s one of Gabriel’s guinea pigs. For a while, “Rings” seems to be about the undergraduate seminar from hell — and since Gabriel actually uses a VCR, the videotape metaphor lives on, sort of (for about 45 minutes). But then it all gets turned into laptop files, and it also becomes a matter of the video-within-the-video. In this one, there’s a new set of flickering images — church flood, burning corpse, cicadas in the shape of a crucifix, a snake eating its tail — to keep you awake nights going “Now WTF does that mean?” But the new images aren’t all that different from the old images. As a horror film, “Rings” goes to the well once too often.

The images turn out to be clues to a mysterious disappearance, which leads Julia and Holt to

Sacrament Valley, the kind of quaint small town that has a dark secret that can only register as the most perilous of clichés. The lady who runs the rooming house is creepy, the photograph on the wall of the girl with the violin is creepy, and Vincent D’Donofrio is even creepier as a jaunty blind local who simply can’t be up to anything wholesome. I’ll reveal no more, except to say that “Rings” takes the “Ring” formula and merges it with the premise of “Room,” with its opportunistic fusion of depravity and PC victimization. The movie, which will be lucky to eke out a weekend’s worth of business, isn’t scary, it isn’t awesome, and it doesn’t nudge you to think of technology in a new way. But it does make you wish that you could rewind those two hours, or maybe just erase them.