The Ring 2: How I Wasted 2 Hours of My Life

The Ring was my first introduction to the world of asian horror, ironically recrafted for a Western audience by Gore Verbinski. But the essential subtle, sublime elements of the genre were still intact. What makes The Ring such an effective movie is that the enemy is not some tangible being that can be stopped if only caught, but a discarnate, supernatural entity who works through time. In that sense, The Ring gains its momentum through a prolongued riddle that has to be solved unless its protagonist, Naomi Watts, wants to face a gruesome death at the hands of the long-haired TV demon Samara. We never see the enemy until the very end, which is marked by much pants-crapping.

Given the critical acclaim of The Ring by both critics and movie-goers alike, I was shocked to look in my paper one day and discover that The Ring 2 was already gone from theaters. What gives? It is as if this film had snuck its way in and out of theaters like my uncle Ling invading someone’s house. When the movie finally came out on DVD, I was the first in line to check it out.

I want my money back, and I want 2 hours of my life back.

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned… I actually sat through all of The Ring 2. No, I did not like it. It was quite unpleasant, and I am sorry. Perhaps through this review I can atone for my sin.

Plain and simply, this movie sucks. It’s awful. There is not a single scary moment in this film, and even the closest thing is a direct copy from a scene in the first movie. What is it about? Well, little Aidan and Naomi Watts have resettled in a tiny town when suddenly there are reports of gruesome deaths involving distorted faces and what not. Naomi Watts freaks out. Now wait a second… why in the world would Naomi freak out when she was the one who made the copies in the first place and distributed them to other people in the first film? Part of the more subtle horror of The Ring was the ending in which the mythos of The Ring is perpetrated by Watts’ action, giving a fictional tangibility to the urban legend of the Ring tape. But whatever, maybe Watts finally realized that these things actually killed people. One thing leads to another and Watts is bent on stopping Samara once and for all.

There is a lot of screaming “SAMARAAAA!!” and about 3,426 repetitions of “hold on Aidan, mommy’s here”. This easily constitutes a good 98% of the dialogue. Inbetween, there is a buttload of CG effects that are so sloppily grafted into the movie that they’re painful to watch. Perhaps the most infamous of these is the reindeer scene in which 40 deer decide to come out of the woods and attack mother and son in their little car. Instead of the cheaper alternative of just training reindeer to smash stuff, the makers of this film opted to have CG deer attack a CG car and have CG glass fly everywhere. Horrible, horrible stuff. Samara apparently has the power to control not only water, but woodland creatures as well. And there’s a lot of water flying around, too. CG water that swirls and spins and looks like a messed up version of the Bellagio fountain show. Wooooooooo.

Is there any redeeming thing about this movie? No. I hate it.

Grade: F

Comment posted by shelby
at 8/4/2007 7:51:14 PM

omg this movie is sooo freaky i couldn’t sleep for months but then i saw scary movie 3 then i wasn’t scared anymore

Comment posted by Nicole Kidman & Naomi Watts Re-Team for Film ‘Need’ - Movie Reviews Blog
at 2/20/2007 9:03:32 AM

[…] Australian actresses Nicole Kidman & Naomi Watts are set to re-team for the first time since they both starred in the movie Flirting back in […]

Comment posted by The Grudge 2 - Movie Reviews Blog
at 11/30/2006 1:52:28 PM

[…] The Grudge 2 wasn’t quite as bad as the Ring 2, but that’s only by a slight margin. I really can’t recommend this to anyone. […]

Comment posted by AhmedF
at 2/15/2006 1:05:30 AM

“This “new” Samara is now some attention-starved little twerp who desperately wants a hug. Her whole motivating goal in the movie is to possess the lead heroine’s son so she can have a “Mommy”. It’s not scary. It’s not even entertaining.”

Shades of Dark Water!

Comment posted by DrSpengler
at 2/13/2006 2:52:35 PM

This movie was really, REALLY bad. That’s…all I can say.

I thoroughly enjoyed the original film, both American and Japanese incarnations (though I prefered the American version), but this just felt like an insult to the original. A “Poltergeist 2″-calibur insult.

By giving Samara more personality and motivation she becomes a great deal LESS terrifying. In the original she was this unstoppable entity that clammored out of your television set and messed you up like nobody’s business.

This “new” Samara is now some attention-starved little twerp who desperately wants a hug. Her whole motivating goal in the movie is to possess the lead heroine’s son so she can have a “Mommy”. It’s not scary. It’s not even entertaining.

The scary-factor fails again, in that we’ve seen all of it before in the original. Seeing the same scares again is just…redundant. The ending where they “defeat” Samara is particularly lackluster, and even after the heroine makes her “witty quip” you’ll still be left thinking “WTF?”.

Again, I must make a comparrison to Poltergeist 2. The original Poltergeist was a ghost-story to the core, some crazy special effects, but a ghost story never-the-less. The sequel, on the other hand, had to throw in giant worm-monsters, out-of-control evil braces, and Craig T. Nelson battling an ancient demon with a magical spear in another dimension.

Well, Ring 2 departs from the original in a similar fashion. The original is a ghost story and a mystery story all wrapped into one. The sequel ends with the heroine racing Samara (similar to the final level of Duck Tales on the NES) within some whacky “television dimension”. Yeah.

And then there’s the sequence with the evil CGI elk trashing the car. That was as bad as the evil CGI wolves that acted like velociraptors in The Day After Tomorrow. But what made that scene ten times WORSE for me, personally, was that there were two obnoxious ethnic stereotypes sitting behind me screaming “Aww sheeeeit! Dey’z gots BEEF, dawg! Dey’z gots BEEF! DAY-YUM BOOOOIIIIII!!” Good God.

This movie is worse than an F. At least bad movies like Troll 2 and Rock n Roll Nightmare have a hilarity-factor to keep them entertaining. This was just stupid AND boring.

Don’t watch this movie. And if your Mom or Dad buy it for you as a gift it’s because they don’t love you.