As far as horror sequels go, "The Ring Two" is decent. It has its moments of suspense, impressive special effects, and a relatively intriguing storyline that elaborates on 2002's "The Ring." However, the dreary mood and the suspenseful mystique that made the first movie effective are absent from this new release.
The story picks up a year after the infamous videotape first made its horrifying rounds in Washington, inexplicably killing anyone who watched it. Reporter Rachel Keller (played by Naomi Watts) and her son Aidan (David Dorfman), now residing in the small town of Astoria, Ore., believe they are safe from the wrath of the devil child Samara.
However, the tape has now made its way down the West Coast, and it begins to infiltrate the community in which they live.
For those who found the first film intriguing, "The Ring Two" is an interesting continuation of the story, elaborating on the same characters from the first film and introducing some new twists to the plot, including a scene with Samara's biological mother. The plot is somewhat confusing, but fans of "The Ring" will undoubtedly attempt to untangle it.
The film is directed by Hideo Nakata, director of "Ringu," upon which the American version of "The Ring" was originally based.
There is a somewhat obfuscated theme of motherhood running through the movie. Rachel apparently doesn't spend enough time with her own son, and thus, evil forces continue to haunt him. It's supposed to parallel Samara's relationship with her own mother, but much of the storyline gets lost along the way.
By the end, you also want to strangle the small round-faced child that won't stop pestering everyone with her lack of parental supervision. Strangle her, or give her a hair dryer.
The acting is convincing for a horror flick. Watts doesn't overreact to everything the way she does in the first movie, and Dorfman is creepier than Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense."
The special effects also help salvage what "The Ring Two" is lacking in congruency. There's an incident with maddened elk terrorizing the protagonists and an amazing scene in which bathtub water defies gravity.
The problem with "The Ring Two" is that it completely dispels the mystery of the first movie. In "The Ring," Samara doesn't appear to have a weakness. She's unstoppable, attacking through unexplained methods. The moldy blue tint and high-pitched sound effects are chilling and prove that a good amount of time and thought was put into the film. In fact, "The Ring" was even an improvement on Nakata's "Ringu."
In the sequel, however, the film is devoid of these elements, offering a straightforward setting and a poorly constructed rise to suspense. There's also an absence of a suspenseful time limit, in the way that "seven days" from the first movie worked. It seems like the film's creators just wanted to put out something as quickly as possible that would bring fans of the first movie back to the box office.
The plots in both movies are mediocre and open-ended, but this one doesn't even have the mood elements to save it. The ending of the movie is a comprising finish to a confusing plot, though Keller delivers an awesome line that would be the ultimate response to the Dr. Seuss question, "Are You My Mommy?"
Unlike "The Ring," which was directed by Gore Verbinski and catered to hard-to-shock American audiences, "The Ring Two" is similar to Nakata's "Ringu" in that it uses drier, less emotional thematic tactics. However, this leaves the story to rely on a somewhat confusing and ultimately compromising plot.
Maybe American filmmaking isn't such a bad thin
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
