Coroner’s Corner: The Ring Two – Column

coronerscorner200Coroner’s Corner: The Ring Two

by John Bikowski

Let me first start by saying that I am a big fan of The Ring. I saw the original Japanese version, and I thought Gore Verbinski did a swell job of “Americanizing” it for us. I found it to be entertaining and disturbing and was surprised at how close it came to actually being “scary.” If I saw that film at the tender age of 10, I’d’ve been screwed into sleeplessness for months. It would’ve taken some seriously non-ten-year-old erotic dreams to forget images of the little girl Samara crawling towards me to rip out my spleen. Luckily, I saw the film in my 30s, and I was only screwed for a week.

So when I sat down for the sequel, I was pumped up to see more unsettling images wrapped up in a delectable little story. However, the second time around ultimately proved to be a pointless exercise in trying to generate some cinematic income. If you remember, the first flick gave us the idea that anyone who watched a cursed video will be killed by Samara until Rachel (Naomi Watts) and her young son Aidan end the curse by making a copy of the video. The Ring Two begins, interestingly enough, with a high school guy trying to deflect the curse away from himself by making his girlfriend of the day watch the video. Apparently, if the girl sees the video, Samara won’t come to slaughter him. Then it’d be up to her to do the same to someone else. Unfortunately, the girl closes her eyes, and the next thing you know, water pours in and her potential lover boy winds up distorted and dead.

Rachel gets word of the grisly death and she knows that Samara is back and kickin’ ass. She breaks into the crime scene, steals the tape, and then burns it. But her attempts prove futile because there are plenty of copies on the loose. To make matters worse, it seems Samara has set her moldy-fingered sights on Aidan. It’s explained later that all this psychotic demon girl really wants is a Mommy. Samara’s real Mom (played by a slumming Sissy Spacek) was confined to an insane asylum after she tried to drown Samara as an infant. So you can’t blame her for wanting the much more loving (and hot) Rachel. So the best way to attain her goals is to possess Aidan. Rachel is not okay with that scenario, and challenges that if Samara really wants to snag someone, it might as well be her. So Rachel gets yanked into the TV and winds up sucking swamp water in the well with Samara. Rachel climbs out, closes the well cap, and there you go folks… game over. Pretty anti-climactic.

I kept on waiting for something monumental to happen, and it just never did. The only thing this film did was to explain why the spirit of this little girl was pissed off. Other than that, it seemed content to copy ideas from The Shining, What Lies Beneath, A Nightmare on Elm St., and many others, without incorporating them into anything new. The film was also very slow-moving, and the oddness of the little boy really starts to grate on your nerves. Overall, The Ring Two amounts to “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” Don’t waste your time.
(www.dreamworksfansite.com/ring2)