When it was announced that Gore Verbinski was going to direct a remake of Hideo Nakata's excellent Ring (I refuse to call it Ringu because I'm anal like that, but that's how it was released straight to video in North America) I was a little hesitant about it. How would he handle the subtle horror and suspenseful build up? Would he be able to pull off this story using an American setting and American actors? There were a lot of questions about it, but most of them were answered with a resounding yes once the movie started, as it turned out to be a very well made, creepy little movie that did nothing at all to diminish the power of the original. In short, it was a good movie. A couple of years later when it was announced that Naomi Watts was going to return for a sequel directed by Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese Ring that inspired Verbinski's film, I was stoked. I figured this was a win-win situation. They could expand on some of the cool ideas from Verbinski's film and put Nakata's unique spin on things. "What a cool idea!" I thought to myself. Sadly, I was wrong. Very, very, very wrong.

This film picks up more or less where the first one left off. Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her son Aiden (David Dorfman) have moved from Seattle to find a quieter life in the lovely seaside town of Astoria, Oregon (It's a lovely place - I've been there a few times). She takes a job at the local newspaper run by Max (Simon Baker) but soon becomes concerned when a death occurs in the small town that is eerily reminiscent of how things played out in the first movie. She ends up finding the cursed tape and burning it, but when she does we hear all sorts of silly creepy noises come from the fire, signifying that Samara hasn't died with the tape and is in fact whipping around the town haunting poor old Aiden. We know this because Aiden and Rachel get attacked by deer shortly after all of this.

What? Deer? Our heroes get attacked in their car by deer? And poorly rendered CGI deer at that? Deer aren't scary. They're cute and timid and unless they're involved in some sort of mating ritual, they usually don't want anything to do with people. Making one of the key scenes in the film a CGI deer attack scene is just a bad idea all around.

At any rate, Rachel has to hunt down the keys to Samara's past and Rex is bound and determined to help her with all of this and save her kid from certain doom because, dammit, he cares. Off they go to save the day and blah, blah blah… who cares. By the time the movie is half way over it's really hard to be concerned with the characters, despite their plight. The development goes nowhere fast, Simon Baker's character adds nothing, and the plight of Rachel and her son is handled quite haphazardly so as to sufficiently remove whatever emotional investment we made with these people during the first half hour of the movie.

The Ring Two is one of the biggest cinematic disappointments I've ever sat through. I had really high hopes for this one as it seemed to be in very capable hands but it failed to deliver either scares, suspense, or even an interesting story or interesting characters. The film doesn't stay within the mythological confines of the first film and instead of concentrating on the spread of the curse through the mysterious tape (a cool idea) it turns into a pretty much by the numbers evil ghost story. It isn't a bad looking movie – the sets are good, the color scheme is gloomy enough to do a good job of capturing the Pacific Northwest's mood, and there are a couple of stand out scenes here and there (a moment where Aiden is approached by Samara in the men's room of a fair is pretty intense) but the film just can't hold together long enough to really work. Naomi Watts, who is usually really good, more or less sleep walks through the film and her co-stars do nothing to help matters in terms of performances. We're seeing nothing new here, it's all too familiar and as such, uninteresting.

The DVD

Video:

The Ring Two hits DVD in what should be a fantastic 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer but what in reality is a pretty poor 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The first thing you'll notice if you're paying attention is the heavy line shimmering and edge enhancement, which is problematic throughout the entire film. The black levels vary, they're not consistent at all (in some scenes they're quite strong, at other times they're muddy looking) and the entire picture looks very unnatural. There's some moderate grain in some spots (some of that might be intentional, either way, that's easy to look past) and the color reproduction also seems to vary from scene to scene as the movie plays out. The entire picture looks very digital, not film like at all and the movie does suffer from these distracting problems.