The Ring Two (2005)

Directed by Hideo Nakata. Starring Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Simon Baker, Elizabeth Perkins, Sissy Spacek, Gary Cole, Ryan Merriman, Emily VanCamp. [PG-13]

This feeble and overlong sequel mostly ignores the videotape gimmick (except for the prologue sequence, which doesn’t even try to be scary, though it does land an amusing punchline), and just settles on exploiting the ghostly and vengeful presence of Samara, the dead girl with the pasty skin and long black hair. Here, the nasty spirit doesn’t leap out of the TV screen too often—but in one of the stupidest scenes in the movie, a human character is pulled into a set—but she does like to do a little light body-possessing and some heavy mommy-clinging. Contractual obligations bring back poor Watts, who’s forced to utter some really bad dialogue while acting vaguely concerned and/or terrified the entire way: “All she wants is a mother…that’s all she wants…and she’ll keep coming until she finds one” (goosebumps, ooh!). Dorfman also returns, and he’s just as unsettling and robotic as before—last time, he seemed to be doing a bad imitation of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, while here, he seems to be aping Haley Joel Osment in A.I. It’s never a good sign when the “scenes of terror” inspire explosive laughter, like when Bambi’s descendants finally decide that enough is enough with “man”…time for payback. Nakata, who directed the original Japanese film (Ringu) and its sequel, makes his American debut with this film (unrelated to the Japanese sequel); he became so disgruntled with studio interference during filming that he has disowned this movie and vowed to never work in Hollywood again. Do yourself a favor and make a similar vow to treat this thing like a cursed video cassette and never watch it.

23/100