The Ring Two opens with a boy and a girl sitting on swings at a
playground in the park. Their names are Jake and Emily, and they're on the verge
of graduating from high school--yet it's only now that Jake has thought about
asking Emily out for a date. Despite her initial misgivings, she agrees to go
with Jake to his home. His parents are out, so they can chill out on the couch
with some booze. But before they can do that, Jake has something he wants to
show Emily…it's this really weird videotape. Just when Rachel Keller and her
young son Aidan thought the horror was over, Samara comes a-calling once more,
and this time, that perky little dead girl will not take no for an answer. After
the events of the first Ring film (which was a remake of the Japanese horror
film Ringu), Rachel and Aidan move to a nice quiet town by the ocean (this
doesn't sound like a very good idea, since the supernatural menace that stalked
them uses water as a theme), where Rachel gets a job at the local newspaper.
When a local teen turns up dead with a horrified, ghastly expression on his face,
Rachel realizes that Samara is back on the prowl once more.
The rules that were carefully set up during the first film are pretty much
ignored as Rachel finds the cursed tape and burns it--only to discover that
Samara is still stalking them. And then things devolve into a weary cat and
mouse chase, and not even lead actress Naomi Watts' well-meaning enthusiasm can save this
film, with a storyline that gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. Although
Hideo Nakata, who created the original Ringu film, directs it, The Ring
Two is not as good as either the original Japanese film or the American remake.
While Nakata creates some stunning visual imagery here (most notable is a
bathroom flooding scene where the water eerily flows upwards towards the ceiling)
The Ring Two lacks the primal intensity of the first film, and as a result it's
just not as scary. A good example of the problem is an unintentionally
funny sequence where Rachel and Aidan are attacked by deer while driving through
the woods. The film struggles hard to create scary moments, yet like the deer
scene they are nothing more
than mood pieces that make very little sense and contribute nothing to the overall story.
The first movie at least had an enthralling mystery that
propelled the narrative, as Rachel desperately sought to discover what the
malevolent force behind the curse of the videotape was, before it claimed the
life of her son. But now, in the sequel, we already know what the nature of the
menace is, and yet the film doesn't offer us anything new by way of back-story
(the Ring Two does offer a superb and creepy performance by Sissy Spacek in a
cameo appearance as Samara's mother). The DVD I saw was the expanded, unrated
version of The Ring Two. Yet it's not unrated because of graphic violence or
wild sex scenes, but simply because the producers inserted new footage, making
this a new version that was not submitted for a rating. The DVD is loaded with
the usual special features about the making of the film (although there's no
audio commentary), but one item in particular worth noting is "Rings" a short,
15-minute film that details the harrowing days before Jake invites Emily out for
their fateful date from the beginning of the film. "Rings" is everything that
The Ring Two is not: creepy, suspenseful, and riveting. Watch this before you
see the main movie, and you'll be reminded of what The Ring Two should have been.
--SF
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