Should Have Had a Familiar Ring to It: A Review of The Ring Two

By June Pulliam

03/21/2005

The Ring Two. Dir. Hideo Nakata, 2005.

The Ring Two had a promising beginning—a desperate teenage boy is trying to get “a dumb girl from school” to watch a copy of the fatal video he’s made just for her so that he can avoid the horrific death reserved for those who do not share Samara’s disturbing vision with the world. As the “dumb girl” is left alone in the living room to watch, the boy who is willing pass the buck cowers in the kitchen, with the microwave clock telling him that he has two minutes until midnight, presumably two minutes to live. 

We who have seen The Ring already know that this boy isn’t just making things up, since his forearm sports the trademark hand shaped burn common to all who have been touched by Samara. When the “dumb girl” finishes watching the video, her “friend” who set her up returns to the living room confused, since that room of the house seems to be flooding. When he asks her if she watched the video, she says that yes, she played it, but kept her hands over her eyes the whole time. The “dumb girl” isn’t so dumb at all it seems, and her friend from school who would trade her life for his suffers the same fate as the kids in the beginning of The Ring.

I say this was a promising beginning because screen writer Ehren Kruger, who also wrote the script for The Ring, seemed to be doing what any good sequel should do, continuing the story and tying up loose ends from the last narrative.  The Ring ended on a sinister note that begged for a sequel: Rachel realizes that the key to surviving a viewing of Samara’s video is to make a copy and show it to someone else; hence, the film ends with Aidan, guided by her hands, making a video and showing it to us, the dumb-assed audience who has been sitting in the theater for two hours watching what, if we believe the story, could lead to our own demise. So the tape survives, and one can only wonder how it has proliferated. Alas, these first few moments of the film were the demise of that particular story line. 

The mysterious death of this local teenager leads us to a small news room where we find Rachel Keller, desperate for a story in her new job as reporter in a podunk Washington town. She and Aidan had been relocated there for only a week, in their efforts to put the curse of Samara behind them. Local police are confused by the death, which they believe is a homicide committed by the girl, who is found hiding in the basement. However, they can’t quite be sure since the victim has turned purple, his face a rictus of fear, and there is no visible means of death. Rachel is determined that Aidan won’t be victimized by Samara again, so she breaks into the crime scene and steals what we are led to believe is the last remaining videotape (yeah, right, and I have some swampland to sell), in order to destroy it. But Aidan isn’t safe, for Samara is more pissed than ever, and soon her spirit possesses Aidan’s body, and Rachel must spend the rest of the film exorcising her son.

I’ll now stop being so plot heavy in this review, since I don’t want to ruin the film for you should you choose to see it, but I will tell you this: Kruger’s dénouement is entirely too similar to the dénouement in The Ring, and it makes me want to yell at Rachel, “didn’t you see the first movie? Don’t you remember that Samara isn’t your everyday ghost who only wants the comfort denied to her on earth, but is instead implacable?”

While The Ring Two had some interesting moments, I certainly didn’t find it scarier than the first, mainly because in the first, I’d already seen Samara coming out of that television set, and I’d already seen the empurpled corpses she’d left in her wake, so seeing these things again was anticlimactic. Instead, I thought that the film tried too much to be the original Ring, and that was its failing. The original Ring had already been made. Or had Nakata and Kruger, like the “dumb” girl in the sequel’s beginning, watched the original while hiding their eyes?

Still, I’m not willing to put The Ring Two on my infamous list of “People Who Owe Me Money,” and here’s why: The Ring Two does add some interesting plot lines to the Ring story, at least, to the Americanized version of Koji Suzuki’s Ring trilogy. And the director, by the way, also directed Ringu (1998), the Japanese version of Suzuki’s novel that is a combination of his story and the then forthcoming 2002 American film. We get to meet Samara’s birth mother, who looks like a cracked-out Loretta Lynn from Coal Miner’s Daughter, which makes sense since she’s played by Sissy Spacek as a brunette. But here is my advice: see this one at the bargain cinema, or at least, don’t go to the movies expecting the same disturbing and wonderful film-viewing experience you had with The Ring.