Some movies have plot holes. Little plot holes that a dragonfly might squeeze through, or great gaping holes that you could drive an SUV through. That's all kid stuff though; there is another class of movie that is nothing but hole with a few scattered shards of plot strewn about the carcasses of the creativity, intelligence and basic coherence of everyone involved in cobbling the whole mess together. Such a movie is Ring Around The Rosie (2005), which is even confused about what it is called - there's a prominently featured double-barreled subtitle to the movie: 'Fear Itself: Dark Memories'.
The story, such as it is, consists of a young woman learning that her grandmother, (the very talented Fracnes Bay, wasted in a botched deathbed scene that could have been filmed better by an orangutang with a mobile-phone camera) has left her an old family house in the woods, and going there to wind things up and sell it. It seems she has troubled memories of some some sort - there are flashes of little girls singing 'Ring around the rosie', apparently some American corruption of the famous nursery rhyme about the Black Plague (just about the only genuinely creepy allusion in the whole movie) and wakes up in a sweating, shivering mess after dreaming about all this. In her grandparents' house, she continues to be highly tense and paranoid, jumping at shadows, reflections and being reduced to a screaming wreck when she mistakes a bunch of rather puny mice for rats. Her boyfriend senses her tension, and offers to stay with her while she packs things up, but of course, she refuses, like any protagonist in a braindead horror flick.
In the week ahead, the woman continues to jump around nervously, have hallucinations and also to be alternately intrigued and scared by a mysterious caretaker who seems like a cross between a Norman Bates style psycho and a creepy guy from a redneck horror movie. The girl's sister turns up to help out, and what follows is a labyrinthine sequence of creepy incidents involving much danger to life and limb, running around screaming and madly flailing, attempted rape and murder, ambiguous glimpses of repressed memories and o forth. It's all pretty yawn worthy after a while - as if the writer attended the class on Twists In The Tale in Creative Writing 101 and then proceeded to bunk the rest of the course, smug in posessing one little nugget of knowledge of plot devices, at least.
Finally the girl runs screaming out of the house, into the arms of her conveniently-returned boyfriend who points out 'You're sister's been dead for 17 years.' Yes that's right, that's the big reveal. Wow. After that, the heroine finally cracks a smile after around a 100 minutes of maintaining an expression of frozen discomfort, remniscent of a child who has just eaten cod liver oil and all is well, even if just about nothing at all has been explained or resolved to any real purpose. Ambiguity has an a honoured place in horror storeytelling - sheer vagueness, however, does not. It seems as if the writers on this film spent all their creativity thinking up multiple titles for the movie, commited collective seppuku and were then replaced by a brain-damaged janitor found sniffing cleaning fluid in a broom closet. A waste of time for all concerned.
