Ring 2 (1999)

Day 49 of Sobriety.

I had been wanting to re-watch the first Ring (1998) movie for a while, as I saw it a few years after it came out and remember it being very creepy and really liking it. Then recently, as fortune would have it, I came across a copy of Arrow Video’s Ring blu-ray box for an incredibly cheap price. It includes Ring, Ring 2, the prequel, Ring 0: Birthday (2000), and the “alternative” sequel that predated Ring 2, called Spiral (1998).

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Spiral, and that I enjoyed it too. Apparently, though, the producers didn’t care much for the sci-fi-ish direction of the plot development in Spiral, so they quickly made another, more horror-oriented sequel: Ring 2.

Before watching Ring 2, I watched the first Ring again—for the first time in about twenty years. I enjoyed it again, but not so much as I remember having done so the first time around. I guess it is just not so fresh as it once seemed, having been widely imitated. The creepy horror set pieces are still very effective, though, and I would still rate it as a good film. 

So, I was looking forward to seeing how the plot was going to develop in Ring 2, as my understanding was that it was a generally well-received film. Unfortunately, though, it was a big disappointment.

Ring 2 falls into the familiar pitfalls of many horror movie sequels. In particular, it tries to explain things too much. It provides dumb pseudo-scientific reasons for the supernatural phenomena that were so weird and creepy in the first film. I don’t know why more directors and screenwriters don’t realize that when you explain the crap out of everything it stops being scary. In Ring 2, fear of the supernatural unknown is replaced with what almost comes across like people battling each other with super-powers.

Unlike the first movie, none of the characters in  Ring 2 are believable, and they behave in ways that no one ever would. In addition, the story, while dumb, is convoluted and sometimes so poorly presented that it is hard to know what is happening at times. For example, in one scene in which one of the main characters dies, the persons death is shown so obliquely that I didn’t realize until much later in the film that it had actually happened. Even when I rewound to check the death scene again, it was just incredibly vague.

There are a couple of scenes where the makers clearly tried—and to some extent succeeded —to recapture some of the atmosphere of dread that permeated the first film. But it’s really just a couple of isolated scenes. Towards the end of the movie, I wondered if, in more skilled hands, the “scientific” angle that it takes could have resulted in something along the lines of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), which I really like. But sadly, for the most part, Ring 2 was, for me, a boring trudge through an uninvolving and far-fetched plot with characters that, by the end, I no longer cared about.

Hopefully Ring 0 will be better—I’ll try not to be discouraged!