I hated the American remake of The Ring so much that it took me nearly two decades to get around to watching the original. I was surprised to find out that while it was no classic, it wasn’t half bad. Because of that, I decided to take a chance on the sequel, Spiral. Man, this one’s even worse than the American version!
Spiral is mostly notable for its odd release. In Japan, the studio was banking on it to be a hit, so they released it simultaneously with the original. I guess the thinking was you’d go see The Ring, and as soon as the credits rolled, you’d run across the hall of the theater and see this one. Needless to say, it was a complete failure, and it was quickly forgotten about long before the American remake even came out. It was also effectively written out of existence by the “official” sequel, The Ring 2, which completely ignored the events of this movie, and with good reason.
It’s a shame too, because it has an OK hook. Ando (Koichi Sato) performs an autopsy on the dead husband from the first movie. Since they were old school friends, he decides to do some investigating into his pal’s death, and stumbles upon the cursed videotape. Like a dumbass, he watches the tape, but unlike the previous victims, he winds up having a very different experience.
In the first film, the rules were dumb and overly simple, but they were still rules. This one bends over backwards to not only rewrite those rules, but to add in a bunch of gratuitous nonsense on top of the already shaky mythology. All this does is severely bog down the second half of the movie. I hate it when sequels overexplain the killer’s backstory, but this might be the most egregious case I’ve ever seen. It involves DNA, cloning a dead son, and a stupid explanation that the deaths from the VHS tape are really caused by a virus. What? Also, it turns Sadako from a ghostly girl with messy hair into some sort of half-assed campy femme fatale?!? The meta shit at the end is dumb too, and the “happy” ending is too much to take. It also drags on forever.
Whatever director Hideo Nakata did right in the first one is completely undone by new director Joji Iida, who promptly does an about face in terms of quality. It’s like he saw what worked in the original and made a conscious decision to do the exact opposite. The subsequent sequels wisely ignored this one and went back to the drawing board, hewing closer to the original film. I’m such an idiot I’ll probably wind up watching them eventually.
AKA: Rasen. AKA: Ring: The Spiral. AKA: Helix. AKA: Ring 4: The Spiral.
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