One of those rare horror films that had lasting impact at the box office, Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” was not a one-weekend wonder. Based on “Ringu,” a 1998 Japanese movie about a lethal videotape, it held on in multiplexes for months, becoming one of 2002’s most profitable American films.
A sequel was inevitable, although DreamWorks broke with tradition by giving the job to Hideo Nakata, the original director of “Ringu.” He’s making his American debut with “The Ring Two,” which carries over two essential members of Verbinski’s cast: Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller, a Seattle reporter, and David Dorfman as her young son, Aidan.
But while the location has changed, from Seattle to the Oregon coast city of Astoria, Nakata is stuck with the same limited gimmick: a hypnotic videotape that sucks people into television sets and transforms them into hideously deformed corpses. Like most sequels, “The Ring Two” turns repetitious and desperate as it tries to match the impact of the original.
Rachel and Aidan have moved away from the city to suppress their more unfortunate memories, and she’s taken a job at The Daily Astorian. But the ornery cassette (or one of its offspring) has followed them. Soon it’s generating nightmares that may or may not be real, some of them involving Rachel’s apparent abuse and attempted murder of her child.
Nakata does pull off a few spooky effects. The first of the tape murders is genuinely scary, and there are a couple of “boo” moments that catch the audience by surprise. A broad-daylight scene in the woods, in which deer surround and threaten Rachel and Aidan in their car, is simultaneously frightening and funny. An episode in which Aidan insists on saying “I love you, mommy” is oddly chilling because she’s used to him addressing her as Rachel.
Has Aidan simply transformed himself into Damien, the demon child of “The Omen”? Dorfman certainly plays him that way, though the idea doesn’t go very far. Nor do such standard scare tactics as the disconnected phone, the descent into the basement, the blinking lights, the overflowing bathtub that contains a ghostly apparition.
The screenwriter, Ehren Kruger, who wrote “The Ring” as well as “Scream 3,” seems to be making it up as he goes along. Much of the movie has an improvisational quality; what’s missing is a coherent storyline. The supporting actors are shoved in front of the cameras for a scene or two, then forgotten.
Instead of Brian Cox and Jane Alexander, who lent some class to Verbinski’s “Ring,” the sequel features Sissy Spacek and Elizabeth Perkins, both of them tossed into throwaway parts. But then none of the actors fares well here, and that includes the Oscar-nominated Watts (“21 Grams”) and Simon Baker (from “L.A. Confidential”) as her potential boyfriend.
It’s not impossible to build an entire movie around the hypnotic qualities of video technology. David Cronenberg did it brilliantly two decades ago with “Videodrome,” which still seems far more insidiously nightmarish than any of the “Ring” movies. Couldn’t “The Ring Two” at least have upgraded its homicidal video to DVD?