Ring Two

So lets deconstruct The Ring Two: Watts is back as Rachel Keller, single mom to Aidan (David Dorfman), a sullen weirdo (with the eyes of Haley Joel Osment) who refuses to call her mommy. Rachel keeps a tight smile going, but you can tell she's not pleased about leaving her cool job as a reporter in Seattle to move to Astoria, Oregon. She feels overqualified reporting for a local rag, despite its hottie editor (Simon Baker). But she needed to get Aidan away from that cursed videotape from the first Ring movie. That's the tape that looks like a Nine-Inch Nails video. You play it and you're dead in seven days after seeing skanky, stringy-haired Samara (Kelly Stables), the ghost girl whose adoptive mother drowned her in a well. So Rachel runs, and when the tape shows up again you knew it would she gets it in her head that Samara wants to possess Aidan. Rachel almost drowns him in a tub when he starts acting like Samara. When doctors intervene and see the bruises on his body, Rachel goes with her demon alibi. Then Aidan ever so sweetly calls her mommy. Ooo eee ooo.

At least the child-abuse theme bolstered when Sissy Spacek does a killer cameo as Samaras nut job birth mother who tried to kill her daughter to stop the dead from getting in gives you a provocative theme to chew on while the sequel goes about scare business as usual. The generic quality of the jolts is a surprise, considering that Hideo Nakatathe gifted Japanese director of the original Ringu in 1998 and its 1999 sequel has stepped in for The Ring director Gore Verbinski. It's Nakata's first Hollywood film, and you can feel the tension between his dark J-horror (the J is for Japanese) instincts and the pressure to protect a PG-13 franchise (Verbinski's Ring grossed a whopping $129 million) that favors suspense over splatter, gloss over grit. Formula is not something you associate with Nakata.

For starters, Ehren Kruger's script for The Ring Two not only veers from Ringu 2 but strains credulity at every turn. This is not to say that Nakata doesn't give you the hebbie-jeebies. Look out for hostile reindeer, a doctor (Elizabeth Perkins) with a needle, a corpse with a face twisted to resemble Edvard Munck's painting The Scream and that Medea moment in a bathtub.

Since avenging ghosts are part of the J-horror tradition, Nakata fares best showing Samara up to her old mischief. She keeps following Aidan around, popping up on his TV and in his dreams. Stables, an actress in her twenties, is quite a terror as the teen Samara. But even in mottled, blue-veined skin, courtesy of makeup wiz Rick Baker, and only one eye exposed behind long hair, Stables persuades us to see the lost child in the demon. Her performance deepens the complex relationship between Rachel and Aidan. Watts is dynamite, finding nuances in a role built without them. Her scenes with Dorfman give the film a needed psychological gravity. The rest is cliched horror gimmickry. Example: Aidan takes a digital photo of himself in a mirror. Checking the shot in the monitor, he sees Samara behind him. It's a still photo, but Samara is suddenly three-dimensional and moving. The chill you feel might have cut deeper if The Ring hadn't already pulled the same trick with a fly.

Nakata gets back up to speed for the finale in which Rachel faces her demons real and imagined in a well. Scream or not, you have to admire Nakata's skill at letting the dead run free while hinting that we may have more to fear from the living. With a braver step in that direction, this middling movie would ring more than box-office bells.

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PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Mar 17, 2005)