Ironically for a movie centred around a copied videotape, Gore Verbinski’s remake of The Ring was mostly noticable for proving that a copy needn’t be of inferior quality. Treating its source material – that was only four years old at the time – with respect in a way that successfully transmitted its J-Horror scares to a Western audience. However, if there’s one thing a successful Ring movie attracts, it’s sequels as Hideo Nakata’s original Ringu managed to score itself not one, but two offical follow-ups in under two years.
While Dreamworks didn’t react quite as excitedly to Samara/Sadako’s popularity as Toho did, further adventures for the US version of the soggy little girl in the TV screen was all but inevitable, but with Verbinski happy to play the one-and-done card, who would steer the franchise from here?
In something of a meta choice, Hideo Nakata himself was hired to hop back into the director’s chair to marshal yet another version. Inspired choice, or was this one Ring for Hideo too many?
After managing to save herself and her child from the curse of the ghostly Samara, we find Rachel Keller and her son, Aidan have moved to Astoria, Oregon to distance themselves from their harrowing past. However, as anyone who saw the 16-minute short film, Rings, we know that the videotape that contains the curse of Samara is still in circulation and after it claims a local student in the area, Rachel’s reporter skill kick back in. She discovers that the tape is somehow still doing the rounds because the angry spirit of the murdered girl is still searching for Aidan in order to take advantage of the link they shared.
It seems that scaring teens to death by clambering out of a TV set is becoming rather stale for Samara and she’s decided that she’s going live once more after targeting Aidan for a spot of possession. However, after successfully managing to get her clammy, moist hands on the young boy, Rachel has to play detective once more in order to delve even deeper into Samara’s murky past to figure out how to thwart her latest haunting. But as she tries to work her way past her knowledge of Samara’s foster parents in order to find her biological mother, various obstacles threaten to slow her down. When she isn’t dodging a violent attack by a gang of wild deer, or convincing medical staff that she isn’t an abusive mother, Rachel also realises that Samara will soon use Aiden’s body to kill all who would stop her living once more if she doesn’t figure this supernatural shit out.
But how do you stop a ghost from doing anything, especially one who seems to reside in her own reality when she isn’t treading water into the rugs of her victims and contorting their faces into terrified taffy?
On paper, enlisting Hideo Nakata to jump over to the American version of The Ring franchise is tantamount to genius. After all, if you can’t get Gore Verbinski back to skillfully emulate the tone of the original, why not get the guy who did it originally in the first place? Lest we forget, before the remake was throwing deranged horses at Naomi Watts and giving Samara a flashy, visual effects glow up, Nakata was pioneering this kind of stuff with a fraction of the resources. However, reality proved to be somewhat different in practice and while The Ring Two certainly has a couple of decent moments, it mostly ends up being proof that maybe this is one franchise that just doesn’t bare sequels particularly well. Certainly the history confirms this with neither Spiral, Ringu 2 and Ringu 0 coming remotely close to Nakata’s 1998 Ringu, and the main issue seems to be that once a franchise has to fly solo without the slow burn reveals of the original, the picture starts to get a little fuzzy.
Ditching Verbinski’s queasy, green-tinted visuals and instead settling on an oddly cheap look that feels like it was shot directly for DVD, Hideo Nakata’s second attempt at sequelisation takes the well worn route of Samara trying to find some sort of convoluted way to have herself reborn into the world of the living via the use of some sort of vessel. While it certainly makes more thematic sense than the DNA manipulating shenanigans of Spiral, there’s a very real sense that we’ve done all this before – which makes sense because Nakata actually has.
But while other Ring sequels instantly ditched both the videotape stuff and the iconic notion of Sadako crawling out of the nearest gogglebox, The Ring Two wisely tries to keep some of that famous imagery intact. An opening scene (itself a sequel to a DVD extra) tries to put a new spin on the infamous scene while a young Emily VanCamp looks on in horror, but it soon becomes strangely evident that Nakata hasn’t quite gotten the hang of 2005-era visual effects as some strange staging and some pretty distracting green screen proves to be more annoying than scary. Later, some half-decent looking rampaging deer try to match the intensity of the horse rampage from Ring 1 and there’s some neat stuff involving Rachel entering Samara’s monochromatic world to end her curse once and for all, but the director just can’t seem to replicate either Verbinski’s visual flare or even his own talent at encapsulating existential dread.
Even more noticable is that a returning Naomi Watts seems to be under the spell of a whole other curse – that of contractual obligation, and she muscles through the script, phoning it in to such an extent it’s a wonder that Samara could even get a clear line to give out her usual seven day warning. Similarly, the themes of troubled motherhood and implied abuse seem cribbed wholesale from Wes Craven’s New Nightmare while being noticably inferior to future films that braced the subject, namely The Babadook, which leave The Ring Two stuck even deeper in its mediocre dimension.
Still, the movie manages to bust out the occasional arresting moment. Nakata’s obsession with mixing ghosts with H²0 may have been better put to use in Dark Water, but moments that see water flow up out of a bath tub only to flood on the ceiling feels like the director finally starting to find his groove. However, they’re soon swept away by a movie that’s strangely boring, certainly not scary and removes what clout Samara once had as a modern fear icon by employing something of a lazy script. You mean to tell me all you have to do to nullify Samara is just cover her well back over? Jeez, at least with Jason or Michael you have to set ’em on fire or bury an axe in their head or something. Still, even I have to admit that kudos are in order for the casting of Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek, as Samara’s biological mother, meaning that one raging female horror icon managed to birth another.
A strangely half-hearted follow up by Nakata suggests that even he is tiring of wet ghosts with long hair – but of that’s true, what hope does the rest of us have? Despite capitalising on the J-Horror trend and proving that remakes can be a good thing, the US arm of The Ring franchise torpedoes itself to moribund effect – but possibly the most surprising thing of all is that it’s orchestrated by the man who once started it all.
Or in other words – Hideo killed the Sadako star.
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