Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Ring Two / USA / 2005

The sequel to the remake of the Japanese original, and the remake of the sequel to the Japanese original too, for that matter, The Ring Two sees director Hideo Nakata suffer in his Hollywood surroundings. Although responsible for both the Japanese originals, Nakata here loses the essence of Ringu’s horror in favour of hand-holding the audience through the relatively simple back-story.

The two “animal” set-pieces of the Hollywood remakes suffice to highlight the differences between the two films. In the first film, as journalist Rachel Keller and her weirdo son Aidan make their way over a ferry crossing, an on-board horse loses it, bolts around the small ferry and eventually falls over the side. The best sequence of the film, the photography employed to capture the horse’s panic was quite extraordinary, rendering the horse’s power in juxtaposition to its confined environment much like the circumstances of the young girl Samara, whose limbo provides the story’s horror. What was really remarkable, though, was the fact that this sequence was captured through photography alone – no CGI here, thank you very much.

The second film’s animal set-piece, however, is burdened by its reliance on CGI. As Rachel and Aidan drive through some woods, they are set upon by a leash of CGI-deer, bashing the car here and there until the couple manage to flee the scene in panic. Far from being an effective echo of the (in comparison simpler) horse scene, the onslaught of the deer looks ridiculous and releases much of the tension that had been built before. Within the context of a Hollywood horror, the set-piece would seem to work, especially judging by the reaction of the 15-year-old target audience sitting in the cinema. But within the context of a well-regarded horror series that Ringu and its derivatives has become, CGI is one step removed from the approach that has encouraged many viewers to look up the original Japanese films.

As a point of interest, Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly was originally offered the chance to direct The Ring Two but turned it down. Perhaps, like me, he was disappointed the killer video was still only on VHS and hadn’t been updated to DVD format for the sequel.

by Rich Watts | Source: 35mm print
05 Apr 2005 8:04 AM | Comments (1)

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1. Evan Harvey / 1 September 2005 / 3:23 PM

   This sequel achieves a rare feat: It is so bad that it actually distorts and nearly ruins my esteem for the first movie. This may be blasphemy, but I rather liked the American remake of the the first Ring—it had style without an overdose of pretension, the performances were very fine, and it built its sense of dread and depravity slowly… the whole thing just crept up on me, depite my utter unwillingness to be horrified.

   But The Ring 2 is obvious, shabby, and about as scary as watching paint dry. Perhaps the mood of the orginal could not be fully recaptured, but did it have to be jettisoned altogether? And Naomi Watts (who was so good as Sean Penn’s suffering spouse in The Assassination of Richard Nixon) is almost unwatchably bad.

   Almost as bad as those CGI deer.