Rings

This poster contains the original premiere date.

A few days ago my wife & I were discussing films. After her refusal to my invitation (to go see Rings), I decided to see it myself since I think I'm sort of a moderate fan of the first two American remake films plus the original Japanese Ringu trilogy. With no expectations whatsoever, I asked myself why would the world of 2017 would want to see a sequel that took 12 years in the making? After I left the theater the question remained unanswered. 

Rings, AKA The Ring 3, is a direct sequel to The Ring 2 (2005)  directed by F. Javier Gutierrez and starred by Matilda Lutz(as Julia), Alex Roe (as Holt) and The Big Bang Theory star Johnny Galecky (as professor Gabriel) The story takes place 13 years after the events of the previous film. One day while, browsing  a yard sale, professor Gabriel discovers a VCR that comes with a selection of VHS films, so the fond memories from the past lead him into buying the artifact. Later at home he's trying to make it work, while all of a sudden a home made VHS tape pops out with the hand written label "Watch me!" Lightning a pot  to make the mystery worthy, the tape finally plays, revealing the legendary Samara Morgan video. 

Professor Gabriel not only watches YouPorn.

He also likes his students to join in the viewing.

In 2014, Paramount Pictures announced the initially titled The Ring 3D, with F. Javier Gutiérrez directing. In August 2014, Paramount was in talks with Akiva Goldsman to write a third draft of the screenplay, which had previously been worked on by David Loucka and Jacob Aaron Estes. In November, Gutiérrez posted an Instagram photo that showed that the title of the sequel had been changed to Rings. On January 16, 2015, Matilda Lutz was cast in the lead role. Alex Roe was cast as the male lead on March 20, 2015. Aimee Teegarden joined the cast on March 27, 2015, and Johnny Galecki signed on to star in the film on April 1, 2015, playing Gabriel, a professor who mentors and helps both Holt and Julia. The film had been rumored to be a prequel, however, Gutiérrez has stated that that was not true and that the film takes place 13 years after the events of The Ring.

Paramount Pictures originally set the film for a November 13, 2015, release, but in September 2015, the film was pulled from the schedule, and in October 2015, Paramount rescheduled the release date to April 1, 2016. On February 17, 2016, the film was rescheduled for release on October 28, 2016, to take the place of Paramount's previous October horror release staple, the Paranormal Activity series, which ended in 2015 with Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. On September 22, 2016, the film was delayed to February 3, 2017, most likely to avoid competition with Ouija: Origin of Evil, leaving it as the only horror film that debuted around Halloween 2016 − along with Boo! A Madea Halloween.

Matilda Lutz, Italian beauty.

No nudes in Rings but here's Matilda nude anyways.

So, after the professor watches the cursed video, he uses all his professional resources to come up with a scholar research on how when one's soul dies, it inevitably fights back to return to life no matter the cost. This "research" has Gabriel using his students to prove his rather irrelevant theory. Each student would watch the film on the seventh floor of their university, while Gabriel would grant them a "tail"(somebody else to make a copy of the video to watch) to stop the seven day course from happening. Here's where Julia's boyfriend Holt watches the video and decides to stop contacting her in order to protect her from watching the video. Of course, this is 2017 we're talking about, so the video is no longer a VHS tape but, a fully digitized version that is copied every time a new student joins Gabriel's odd project. From then on, the film goes down a shit hole that never allows it to offer something interesting. 

The special effects are obviously good (2017 c'mon!) but that's not the reason a person goes to the movies, is it? The problem I had with this film is how badly it tries to turn into a teenage horror flick, without the elements (gore, nudity, sex) that make a teenage horror flick. The two leads are a couple of freshmen who have no clue where life is going, yet they're more "capable" to decipher the Samara Morgan mystery than a fully scholarly capable teacher. Julia desperately believes Samara is "trying to tell her something" and her muscle head boyfriend agrees. 

What the fuck?!

I'm sure I can solve this without any actual background knowledge.

So, with professor Gabriel's research (made before seven days, wow! what an astonishingly capable teacher!) they set to go to a small town in order to solve the mystery and obviously, save the day. The thing is, Julia changed the video because she watched Samara murdering Gabriel's girlfriend, so this random action, "updates" the original video, forcing Evelyn to take the matter on her own hands. 

Once they reach the watchamacallit town, they meet with a fat blind man who's aware of the Samara Morgan story, and are told to leave the matter alone and go fuck the shit out of themselves in the local hotel.  Clearly, that doesn't happen, they decide to spent their valuable time investigating, instead of fucking, how clever is that? 

Have you tried anal before marriage?

Somebody dropped the bass in the church!

Now, this is supposed to be a sequel so there's got to be something new to add to the urban legend the cursed video is, isn't it? If in the previous films, the story was solved by reaching out to Samara's story, this time we're told Samara Morgan was born evil because of her poor mother, and no, the woman who ran the horse farm in the previous films isn't her actual mother. Samara was adopted because she was so satanically freaky, nobody could stand her. Here's what I think, it could have been the stronger turn this film could have, had it been developed properly. You see, Samara's mother was a teenage girl who disappeared mysteriously 30 years ago. She was a genius violin player and for dirty rotten reasons she was taken from the watchamacallit town too soon. 

Remember the fat blind man? well, in reality, he happens to be the former priest of the town, and to make matters worse, he's a fucking pedophile son of a bitch!! he kept Evelyn (Samara's mother) hidden in a secret room beneath the church. Yes, he was a fucking pig, a piece of shit from hell. Unfortunately, nor the director neither the writers developed the abusive story behind Samara's conception in deep. Instead they chickened out of a far darker and interesting new touch to the story and decided to focus on our two asshole teenager heroes nobody could care less about. 

Hey cocksucker, you better review my film five stars!

I said five stars you dimwit!

So, by the end of the movie, they discover Julia's hand mark means "Rebirth" in Braille, telling the viewer, Samara's return is unavoidable. However, what's kind of confusing is, is Samara Morgan coming back to life for good? or is she going to be reborn in Julia's body as a brand new person? and what about the thousands of copies Julia's computer automatically sends to all of her contacts? will she be reborn every time somebody's seventh day is reached?  Well, I guess we'll never know. 

Overall, one of the many forgettable films you must avoid at all cost. Not even Ring enthusiasts could stand it. Rings feels all too much a forced PG rated film that lacks everything a good horror film could provide the viewer. Wanna go to the movies? Go see The Lego Batman movie! soon a review we'll land right here! 

Stay tuned and eat your vegetables!

Here's the movie trailer:

And the TV prank they made to promote the turd:

Did You Play Polybius at the Arcade Center?

The apparently official game cabinet.

Polybius is an urban legend about a rare arcade game released in 1981. The game was created by a mysterious company called Sinneslöschen (German for "Sense Deletion") and was a puzzle/shoot-'em-up somewhat like Tempest. It was only released in a few suburbs of Portland, Oregon. 

It was supposedly very popular, with people forming long lines to play it. However, players reported strange things about the game, such as hearing a woman crying and seeing grotesque faces out of the corner of their eyes. Players would also have nightmares, experienced nausea, headaches, blackouts or even develop amnesia. Some even committed suicide. Others stopped playing video games altogether and at least one became an anti-video game activist. According to one owner of an arcade, men wearing black suits would often come to collect "records" from the game. 

They did not take any money, simply data on gameplay. Because of this, the leading theory is that it was some sort of government experiment using subliminal messages. The game remains in obscurity as around one month after its release, all of the cabinets suddenly disappeared. One cabinet reappeared in an arcade 1998, but quickly disappeared again. While some have tried to recreate the game, no one has ever found the original ROM.

Title screen.

The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares. 

According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. They're not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played. 

The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti video game crusader or something. We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeared after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again. 

Until the apparently original ROM showed up. 

Here's what we've found so far:

• Found English strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game. 
• Text in the game says "(C) 1981 Sinneslöschen" Maybe a German company?

Even The Simpsons parodied the game.

If these game consoles were ever actually in Oregon, they must have gone somewhere. Many owners of rare and classic arcade games are members of the Vintage Arcade Preservation Society, which lists exactly one person as the owner of an original Polybius: Robb Sherwin, who lives in Colorado, and owns a dozen or so classic video games. However, Robb's listing there is really just a placeholder for his website, Jolt Country with the Polybius Home Page. He lists most of what seems to be known about the urban legend, including a few photos of unknown origin, and a joke YouTube video he made where they find a Polybius game in a garage, turn it on, and — well, you can guess the rest.

But the bottom line is that there is nobody in the vintage arcade community who openly claims to have, or to have ever seen, an actual Polybius. All the issues of Electronic Games magazine from 1981 through 1984 are available online, and contain not a single mention of the game. In fact, I could find no print references to the game at all prior to 2003, when the urban legend was described in GamePro magazine. This essentially nails the lid on the coffin on the suggestion that Polybius ever actually existed. It did not.

However, saying that is one thing, and concluding that it's therefore just an Internet hoax is another. It turns out that the story of Polybius may indeed have an eerily similar basis in fact.

We do know that at least two people fell sick from playing arcade games in Portland, Oregon in 1981. The Eugene Register newspaper reported on November 29, 1981 that 12-year-old Brian Mauro played Asteroids for more than 28 hours, trying to break the record, as local television crews watched. He finally bowed out with stomach discomfort, attributed to anxiety and all the Coke he drank. Researcher Catherine DeSpira, writing in a 2012 edition of online vintage gaming publication Retrocade, discovered that a Michael Lopez developed a migraine headache while playing Tempest on the same day and in the same arcade where Brian Mauro was going for his record. Lopez was reported to the police when he collapsed in pain on someone's lawn. Two players knocked out in the same arcade on the same day. Stories spread like wildfire in the local middle schools: video games were freaking kids out, possibly even trying to take over their minds.

Anyone looking for corroborating evidence would have found even more frightening facts. Throughout the early 1980s, at least nine cases were reported of epileptic seizures being triggered by video games in the United States. It's called photosensitive epilepsy. It's rare and unpredictable, but very real.

Not only that, but there were, in fact, government agents poking around Portland area video arcades at that very same time. Just ten days after Mauro and Lopez crashed, state, local, and federal agents raided video arcades throughout the region. It turned out that some arcade operators illegally used their video games for gambling, by modifying them with counters that allowed owners to pay out cash to players based on how many points they made in their game, and thus increasing business. In preparation for this raid, FBI agents had been going around to arcades and taking photographs of player initials on high-score screens, hoping to identify potential witnesses. And officers had gone into every business in the city that had video games, and poked and prodded around the back of the machine, looking for these illegal counters.

Arcades had also become a popular place for the sale of stolen goods and drugs, and as a hangout for truants. In fact authorities even set up at least one fake arcade in Portland and filled the game consoles with hidden cameras, similar to today's automated teller machines, hoping to catch criminals in the act.

How much more raw material was needed for teenagers to see a pattern? Games were physically harming players, giving them headaches and nausea; and government agents actually were lurking in every arcade shadow. The Polybius urban legend was hardly fiction; it was nearly a docudrama. 

And there's even more evidence that bolsters its validity. The US government did (and still does) use versions of commercial video games. Battlezone, a tank simulator game considered to be the first first-person virtual reality game, was modified with controls that mimicked those of an M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle in 1980, and sold to the military as The Bradley Trainer. It was intended to train Bradley gunners. One still survives in a private collection.

Most famously, in 1996 the US Marines ordered a modified version of the first-person shooter game Doom II and used it to train ground troops on specific missions. The version has since been made available to the public for download. Today the distinction between games sold to the public and games used by the military has been blurred into virtual non-existence...