What The Ring boasted in mood, atmosphere, pacing, characterization, layers of complexity and legitimate spookiness, its successor tries to make up for in ... um ... well ... rampaging deer.
In other words, The Ring Two is a failure. And that's a particular letdown, considering that Hollywood tapped Hideo Nakata for it, the Japanese director whose 1998 horror film, Ringu, was the original source material for The Ring.
Naomi Watts reprises her role as Rachel, the dogged newspaper reporter (if you didn't see 2002's Ring, incidentally, forget trying to make sense of anything that goes on in this sequel). She and her preternaturally mature son, Aidan (David Dorfman) have tried to leave behind the horrors of Samara's home videos by moving to a small town in Oregon. But it's not that easy, and so it isn't long before the appearance of our favorite ghost in desperate need of a haircut.
Unless a movie is packaged to be camp, it can handle only a couple of absurdities before things turn laughable. Ring Two asks its audience to swallow an awful lot of gristle. After a local teenager dies under suspicious circumstances, Rachel has no problem sauntering into an ambulance, where she subsequently unzips the body bag to inspect the corpse. Nor does it prove to be a challenge for her to sneak into the crime scene and retrieve a videotape still in the VCR (lucky break for Samara that evidently no one in the Pacific Northwest has made the switch to DVD players).
There are some amusing bits, but they don't really gel into anything cohesive. Sissy Spacek makes an interesting cameo as Samara's biological mother; it's a hoot to see Spacek, who set the standard for creepy kids back in 1976 with Carrie, more or less riffing on Piper Laurie's role in that earlier movie as Carrie's crazed momma. We know Spacek's character here is crazy because she collects huge piles of newspapers, which — according to Hollywood — is a tell-tale sign of mental illness (i.e. A Beautiful Mind).
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Article comments
1 - Aaron, Duke De Mondo
Chase, i was looking forward to Ring 2, and indeed still am, but the presence of Hideo Nakata never really excited me the way it has some folks. His Ringu 2 was utterly diabolical, save for the scene in the editing suite.
And whatever the case, this must surely be better than the original ring 2, Spiral, which they then ignored totally on account of it was so hilariously shit.
you can find a review of it by clicking the Asian Horror bit on www.mondoirlando.com
it truly was abysmal.
2 - Dave Nalle
I think Ring 2 was quite effective and the changes to the backstory are subtle and not so alien to the original as you suggest.
The best review might be my 13 year old daughter's who was blown away to see Sissy Spacek - "OMG Dad, it's Carrie" - as Samara's birth mother and who thought that overall it was more intense than the first film was.
I think the first film was visually and conceptually stronger, while this film was better on plot and overall suspense. I'd probably say the first film was better, but Ring 2 is still well above horror film average.
Dave