Close Date Expand Location Next Open/Close Previous 0.5 of 5 stars 1 of 5 stars 1.5 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 2.5 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 3.5 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 4.5 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Repeat Slide Current slide
Rob Weychert

The Ring Two

Hideo Nakata, 2005,

I was pretty unkind to The Ring when it came out in 2002, going as far as to make regrettable use of the R-word, and upon rewatching it a couple dozen years later, I was pleased to find myself both more amenable to its silly urban-legend premise and less intent on having a strong opinion about its unremarkable execution. The movie is nothing special, but it’s a perfectly inoffensive way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon, and as I learned later in the day, it shines more brightly when placed next to its abysmal sequel, The Ring Two.

I’m ashamed to say I was persuaded to watch The Ring Two’s “unrated” version, whose extra 20 minutes of footage is not only superfluous, but would have had no effect at all on the PG-13 rating the movie was always engineered to receive. These scenes also apparently haven’t been touched since the DVD release, so their fuzzy SD transfers make them easy to spot, but the theatrical cut’s crisp 4K resolution doesn’t make it any more palatable. Everything about it feels like a first draft, from its Exorcist-lite script to its chintzy CGI, which may not be uncommon for a cash-grab studio sequel, but the level of apathy on display is nonetheless disappointing, especially from a project that somehow convinced Sissy Spacek (!) to spend a day on set.

Six posts in this series

The Ring film poster

The Ring

Go to this post
The Ring Two film poster

The Ring Two

I was pretty unkind to The Ring when it came out in 2002, going as far as to make regrettable use of the R-word, and upon rewatching it a couple dozen years later, I was pleased to find myself both more amenable to its silly urban-legend premise and less intent on having a strong opinion about its unremarkable execution. The movie is nothing special, but it’s a perfectly inoffensive way to spend a rainy Saturday… See more →

Go to this post

Rings film poster

Rings

Matilda Lutz was the lead in this movie the same year she was the lead in Revenge, and I kind of wish I could do to this movie what she did to the dudes in that movie.

Go to this post

Ring film poster

Ring

Our protagonist finds a cursed videotape that kills the viewer a week after they watch it, so she starts using her skills as a journalist to get to the bottom of it, and then almost immediately hands the whole project over to her ex-husband so she can rest her little brain, because she is, after all, just a girl. Oh, and her ex is able to unravel the mystery in fairly short order due to… See more →

Go to this post

The Spiral film poster

The Spiral

In this Ringu sequel, which was released at the same time as the first film, almost every noteworthy survivor of the previous installment is killed off pretty much right away, and we soon start to learn that the series’s cursed-videotape shtick is a lot more complicated than everyone thought. The nature of that complication is revealed, as Hemingway would say, gradually, then suddenly, and I won’t spoil the cuckoo left turn it takes in the… See more →

Go to this post

Ring 2 film poster

Ring 2

Whatever the Exorcist II apologists may tell you, its legendarily scatterbrained attempt to rationalize the irrational is not something to aspire to, even more so if you’re unwilling to match its level of sheer lunacy. Supernatural mythology, especially in Eastern traditions, is a lizard-brain beast with little use for reason, but like that ill-advised Exorcist sequel, Ringu 2 attaches electrodes to its spooks, making a fairly simple story of ghostly revenge into a drawn-out thesis… See more →

Go to this post