The Ring Two: Movie & DVD Review (2005)

(Originally published 2005)

The water budget for the horror movie, "The Ring Two," must have set Hollywood on its can. It's likely the biggest since that old Kevin Costner clunker, "Waterworld."

In the film, bathtubs overflow, ceilings drip, entire houses flood, walls weep, wells vomit, characters nearly drown, yet ironically, the movie suffers from the lows of a creative drought.

As directed by Hideo Nakata from a script by Ehren Kruger, the film joins most of today's mainstream horror movies in that it's bored with itself and with the genre - in your bones, you can feel the ache of its fatigue, and it hurts.

The movie is unique in that it doesn't mock the genre, which has been in vogue since the 1996 debut of Wes Craven's "Scream." Still, maybe a little good-natured hair-pulling wouldn't have been so bad for "The Ring Two." In this case, it might have given the movie the personality it lacks and the beneficial jolts it needs.

A sequel to Gore Verbinski's 2002 film "The Ring" - itself a so-so, Americanized version of Nakata's superior 1998 Japanese film, "Ringu" - "The Ring Two" finds Naomi Watts back as Rachel Keller, a former Seattle-based journalist who nearly died in the first film when she viewed a videotape whose contents were so disturbing, they might have killed her within seven days had her sleuthing not put a stop to the clock.

Now living in Oregon with her creepy son Aidan (David Dorfman), Rachel finds herself in the unenviable position of once again having to deal with a copy of the videotape she thought she had destroyed.

Its contents aren't exactly the stuff of Merchant Ivory. They involve a nightmare of Victorian severity, with humorless, middle-aged women tossing themselves off cliffs and a sketchy young girl with bad hair and worse teeth wreaking all sorts of havoc.

On second thought, maybe this is Merchant Ivory.

So, what gives here? If you've seen the first film and understood its endless haze of puzzles, which kept accumulating until the ideas that fueled them turned on themselves, you'll know what gives - there are no revelations here, not even when Sissy Spacek slums through a kitschy cameo to help sort things out. And if you haven't seen the first film? Well, come expecting a Rubik's Cube without the payoff.

"The Ring Two" has its moments, such as a scene in which several angry young bucks go berserk in a forest, which are well done. Watts also is good, far better than the material, with screen presence to spare in spite of the empty script she inhabits. Still, for her and for Hollywood, this is a bland, underwhelming product, a cash cow meant for a big opening weekend, nothing more.

If "The Ring Two" had a ringtone, it also would be a raspberry.

Grade: C-