The Ring Two

                                     I found you.

The spread of Samara is of crucial importance if you want to live after a week’s time: that is if you watched a certain VHS tape containing images involving a girl buried in a well. While it seemed to be over for Rachel and her son Aiden, Samara isn’t finished with them. Rachel now works as editor for a small town paper while her son has taken up photography (a chip off the ole block), but what seems like a fresh start over will be challenged by a certain female child apparition that doesn’t want to stay dead. The reason that dawns on Rachel for Samara’s return to her is that only *one copy* was made (instead of copies representing both Rachel and Aiden, so her need to alleviate this problem will of course endanger someone else; that is unless she decides to destroy it altogether..). 

So Samara eyes Aiden and Rachel attempts to destroy the VHS copy that led to the death of a high school teenager trying to free himself from the curse by showing a girl he pretends to be interested in (please, Emily VanCamp? I’m pretty sure every guy would be interested in her; I know I would have been..). That doesn’t end Samara’s travels, nope, no siree. Through Aiden, Samara may finally free herself from that damned well and have her own mommy.  That disturbed child with access to our world is an alarming thought, and examples of this we see when certain victims suffer when keeping her from mommy or threatening to send her back. Through Samara’s real mommy (discovered by Rachel while investigating Samara’s past), Rachel may learn how to get that ghoul out of her life for good. It might take having to drown her child to do so…

This time the director of Ringu, Hideo Nakata, was able to take the reins for this sequel to a remake of his own film from 2000 (the American version, The Ring), with Naomi Watts returning from the first film, along with David Dorfman (one of those creepy kids with a cold personality) as her son, trying to relocate to some place new, hoping for a second chance, the quiet of a non-exciting town, but running away from the past without resolving the issues that sent you away from Seattle will only follow no matter where you go.

Simon Baker (most notably of The Mentalist show and George Romero’s Land of the Dead) has a rather bland hunk role as the owner of the paper Watts’ Rachel works, considering her a possible danger to her son when it appears as if she’s trying to drown Aiden (Samara rises from the bathtub water and instinctively Rachel just reacts). He has a romantic interest in her but this is soon dissolved once the debacle with the water in his bathroom and Aiden’s hypothermia-level temperature (and the handprint bruises of Samara on his back) cause him to worry that she is an unfit, rather cruel mother perhaps suffering from mental problems. 

Rachel has to take her investigation on the road when it appears Samara is taken control of her son, a vessel/host for her to invade in order to achieve her dream of having a mother all her own, and Child Protection Services (sending a rather authoritarian Elizabeth Perkins in a thankless role to confront Rachel) are called in to question her. Sissy Spacek has a weird cameo as someone in a mental ward with close ties to Samara and words of advice for Rachel. Perkins jams a hypodermic in her neck, and Baker gets too close to Samara and pays a heavy price for trying to help Aiden.

 At over 2 hours, The Ring Two is exhausting and overlong, but I think Watts is fine in a sympathetic role as a mother at odds with the supernatural, losing her son and fighting a force that may be beyond her capabilities. She may even have to sacrifice herself in order to save her Aiden. There are some rather bizarre scenes that could have been left out and wouldn’t have hurt the film at all or been a bit more inspired (the CGI deer, for instance, and the opening scene with VanCamp and Ryan Merriman just doesn’t quite have the pop that jumpstarts the film as it should). The heavy emphasis on water had become so familiar in Japanese films dealing with ghouls with long black hair and is used at great length to symbolize Samara’s fate once again in The Ring Two. Aiden is rather colorless (the performance of the kid, Dorfman, just doesn’t quite have the pathos his predicament would warrant and he’s not eerie enough when Samara “takes his body”) so it takes Watts’ heavy lifting dramatically to earn our devotion to her cause. And, most importantly, this just isn’t that creepy or compelling as The Ring or Ringu. Samara was an unsettling vision in The Ring and Ringu, but here she’s just a girl with pale skin and hair that covers her face, although that final scene in the well as she crawls after Rachel does leave a bit of an impression, but by then it was too little, too late. I think the investigation is maybe the most interesting/inspired part of the film, as the visual effects sequences feel like an obligation to give the audience some poltergeist/exorcist style evil spirit outbursts. I never felt Nakata was ever that kind of filmmaker more concerned with elaborate special effects as he was developing characters of some depth, allowing the supernatural to disrupt their lives, forcing them into confronting evil and facing a possible dilemma that may not be overcome. Here, he throws strange sequences like water held in suspended animation in a bathroom and deer surrounding Watts' car in the middle of a road out in nowhere sticksville at us that seem implanted into the story like a square peg in a round hole...didn't work to me at all. Still, all in all, worth a look for Watts' work. I think she's first rate.