In 1998, The Ring was released simultaneously with its immediate sequel, Spiral. Spiral was so bad the producers got together and agreed it didn’t exist. After that, they hired the original director Hideo Nakata to helm The Ring 2, the “true” sequel.
As someone who didn’t mind the original and thoroughly detested Spiral, I thought this was a smart move. As it turns out, The Ring 2 is nearly just (but not quite) as bad. Heck, it’s even worse than the American remake and its sequel!
The kernel of the premise is similar to Spiral as everyone is looking for the heroine of The Ring who promptly disappeared after the events of the first film with her young son. Things dovetail once our characters finally catch up with the mother and son duo and learn there is something seriously wrong with the kid.
Even though Spiral was appallingly bad in just about every way, at least the set-up had potential. This one similarly bungles whatever promise it had early on. While Spiral made radically stupid storytelling decisions, at least they were so dumb that it was sure to stay (for better or worse) engrained in your skull for years to come. The additions to the mythology in The Ring 2 are much more generic and uninspired. Most of it deals with a lot of Stephen King/X-Men crap involving psychics and telekinesis, and none of it feels like it should fit in with the mythos of the original. Things really go in the toilet once a doctor tries an experiment on the kid to draw the ghost girl Sadako out into the real world.
There is one genuinely effective moment when a forensics expert recreates Sadako’s face by molding clay over her skull, but the rest of it is aggressively boring. According to The Ring’s lore, if you watch the haunted videotape, you die a horrible death seven days later. When you watch The Ring 2, you’re sure to die of boredom seven minutes in.
Nakata later went on to direct the sequel to the American remake, The Ring Two.
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