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Directed by: Hideo Nakata Starring: Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Simon Baker, Daveigh Chase, Sissy Spacek The Ring Two, sequel to the movie that people either regard as the scariest film of the last few years or a silly movie about a SCARY LITTLE GIRL. Whichever side you were on for the first one, it's safe to say that you'll be on the same for this. PLOT: After The Ring, Naomi Watts & her son get leave Seattle, and end up settling in a small coastal town in Oregon. She works for the paper there as well, and starts to realize something's up when the office hears over their convenient police scanner that the body of a local teen has been found, and all they can talk about is how horrible his face looked. You can assume what takes place from here on out. Based on how the Rotten Tomatoes reviews are shaping up, I'm betting that, like with The Grudge, I'm going to be one of the few people who like the film, but goddamn it, I did. My main complaint is that the creepy atmosphere of the first one, the reason I loved it, is nearly non-existant here. It comes and goes (every shot in Watts' house, the Morgan house later on), but for the majority of the film, I thought it felt more like a drama than a horror film. A lot of this one consists of Watts investigating the backstory of Samara, and that's exactly what it feels like: a whole lot of searching. The actual Ring tape is almost nonexistant this time around (it gets the first kill in the movie, and then Watts destroyes it about 10 minutes in), and with it, much of the suspense goes too. Still, as a way to spend two hours, I was satisfied. I just wish it was creepier. RATING: 3.5/5 PROS: Wonderful music, the same creepy atmosphere as the first one... CONS: ...but not nearly enough of it. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377109/ Dr. Sheaus fucked around with this message at 01:55 on Mar 19, 2005 |
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Mar 18, 2005 18:49
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:10 |
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I really enjoyed this one. The problem is how the screenwriter (Ehren Kruger) and director (Hideo Nakata) went about this sequel. Instead of making a movie accessible to everyone, this movie seems to really cater to the hardcore fans of the original. There is almost NO setup to the new conflict unless you are EXTREMELY aware of the previous happenings in the first film. Everything from Evelyn (Samara's real mother) humming the mysterious song Samara sings in the original film (you can faintly hear it at parts in the movie and on the cursed tape, if you look really carefully), to a subtle nod to the original author of the Japanese novel, Koji Suzuki (a nurse refers to a "Dr. Koji" in the hospital scene), is nothing but complete and total fan service that will go unappreciated to the casual viewer. Unfortunately, this was a mistake. It makes the film very melodramatic, destroying the sense of heavy dread that the first film worked so hard to create and maintain. What was originally an undescribable fear of a seemingly innocent child has now become a sort of "OH NOES A DED GURL!!1~" type of deal. Samara's presence is constant throughout the film, and even though most of her appearances are well planned and effective, I fear that this decision to make her a more present villian has ruined her "reputation" in many movie-goers' eyes. All of that being said, this was a really good spin on the American "Ring" franchise, and although the critics haven't bitten, I myself enjoyed it. The special effects were AMAZING. From the water repelling from Samara like opposing magnets, to the CGI deer (who attack Rachel and Aidan at one point in the film... surprisingly disturbing and well filmed), I was thoroughly impressed. The dialogue for the most part was well written, as well. Instead of sounding stale and well thought-out, conversations included light stutters, change of words, and believable phrasing. The acting is top-knotch. Naomi Watts delivers a perfect performance; Sissy Spacek, who plays a new character named Evelyn, nearly succeeds in stealing the spotlight with her nervous twitching and disturbing one liner ("You let the dead get in..."). But young David Dorfman, playing Aidan Keller, completely floored me with his firm grip on facial expression and physical reaction to his frightening situation. Keep an eye on this kid.. he has a bright future. One of the main complaints from critics, as far as a quick glance at the RottenTomatoes page, is that The Ring TwO is devoid of character development and entertainment; which, in my opinion, are pretty lame things to be bitching about when it comes to a horror film's sequel. As long as you are familiar with the first film and really enjoyed it, you'll like this one as well. No, it isn't going to win Oscars, but The Ring TwO is still far better than The Grudge... and that is saying something. 4.0/5.0
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Mar 19, 2005 10:17
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This movie was about as good as I expected to it be, which was about half as good as the first movie. That still ranks it above every horror movie to come out this year so far, but that's not saying much. The first thing to know is you absolutely must see the first movie before you see this one, or it won't make any sense. The director doesn't have time for recaps and and just jumps right in assuming you know all about Samara, the significance of seven days, and what do with the video tape. If you don't, you honestly shouldn't be in the movie theater, because it's not worth it. The Ring was a fairly intelligent thriller with an incredibly intelligent protagonist, and this movie is similar but not quite on the level. Though the plot didn't really end in the first movie (the tape wasn't destroyed), the director decides not to really tackle the tape issue and instead begins a more standard horror plot featuring a creepy kid, a sleepy town, and an overstressed parent. You know, like The Shining, and more recently, like Hide and Seek. There's even the aerial tracking shot of a jeep driving deep into the wilderness. While the original movie had an inventive plot, this one doesn't, though the director does his best to give things a fresh coat of paint and still manages to make a better-than-average movie. Unlike the recent The Grudge by the same director, and most horror films come to think of it, the protagonist - Naomi Watts - doesn't idiotically muck about wandering into dangerous places and doing stupid things. One thing distinct and remarkable about the Ring series is that the character of Rachel actually spends most of her time investigating and preventing further danger instead of walking headfirst into somebody's axe. Still, this time around, even she can't hold up the movie. There's a real star in this picture, and it's the kid. This actor is amazing. He's adorable, he's creepy, he gets all the good lines. And strangely, he doesn't seem to have aged at all since the first movie - which was what, like 3 years ago? There are some legitimate scares here, and there was an awful lot of screaming in my theater. On the other hand, I saw them all coming, so that lessened it somewhat for me. If you're looking for a good horror movie, go rent The Ring. If you're looking for a mediocre sequel, go see this movie.
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Mar 20, 2005 04:08
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This movie was retarded. You're all on crack. Lots of spoilers in this post. There is a part where CG deer stare at them in the car, attack the car, more CG deer show up, then the staring contest resumes. The entire theater was laughing at how horrible this was. Every single horror cliche was put in this movie, something that was notably absent from the previous movie, and made it everything I feared a big blockbuster sequal would do to it. On top of this, things don't make sense. What the hell is with her being adopted from a crazy lady now? In the last movie they said the mother went to africa or something to get a treatment that would allow her to have a child, but she wasn't "supposed" to have a child and that's why Samara was evil. Did that just get completely flung the gently caress out the window? On top of this, Samara should have been called CGmara (GET IT?!?) because that's all that she ever was. At one point she was made of water? What the gently caress? Also when did she get MIND CONTROL POWERS? Posessing someone I can understand, but making someone kill themselves ... uh ... ok? The reason I'm giving this reason a 2 is the well scene at the end. That was pretty badass, even I'll admit. Also, I'd have rated it lower if it didn't fit the "funny" bad catagory movies can fall into. This was at least worth watching for me because of funny/awful it was. If you want to go see a classicly horrible example of a movie that shouldn't have been made and shits on the origional, go ahead and see it. 2/5
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Mar 20, 2005 05:27
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This is possibly a contender for one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Rediculous 'CG deer attacks' as mentioned earlier amongst other terrible CG jobs, characters with idiotic logic, and actors that are impossible to take seriously ruin what few redeeming qualities the film may or may not have had. One of the most hilarious moments of the film was when Aiden was taken to the hospital, after the psychiatrist interrogates Rachel of abuse, the other doctors walk in with their arms crossed with an "Oh now you dunnit" look on each of their faces. 1.5/5 Saved from a 1 only by the cool 'bath tub' scene. A friend of mine nudged me awake after I had dozed off towards the end... I wish he hadn't. Murderous Milkmen fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Mar 20, 2005 |
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Mar 20, 2005 07:38
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There were some incredibly bad lines that were there almost to make the audience try to figure out why they were actually there. Especially the line when Samara is "defeated." It belonged more in an action movie than a horror. The CGI deer was annoying not only for them being very obviously CGI but there were some shots of the deer just staring at the camera and doing nothing else. Is it that hard to make a deer stand still for 5 seconds? Too many BOO moments and the fact that you've seen the dead faces before make scariness almost nonexistant. A sad sequal. 2/5
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Mar 20, 2005 09:14
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I thought it was pretty mediocre, especially considering I enjoyed the first one so much. It seemed like they replaced all of the suspensful/creepy visual moments from the first one with second-rate Wes Craven-isms. As has been said, lots of 'BOO!!' scares. While I didnt hate the CG deer scene as much as everyone else, the film had some pretty dodgy GC effects like the near constant 'blue static TV screen' distortion that occurred in half of the 'scary' scenes worst offender was right before that kid died in the beginning, and they made the background behind him the same background as was in Samara's world, for some reason. It also had some pretty rough acting and plenty of really cheesy lines. "I'M NOT YOUR loving MOMMY!" was worthy of both laughs and use in a bad action movie. It did have its moments, though crab walk up the side of the well. I thought it broke nicely into thirds. The first was pretty mediocre, the second seemed to be picking up and held some promise, but the final third was pretty bad. I gave it a 2.5. I wouldnt caution against seeing it, but there's no reason to do it in a full price theater. Wait for video or a budget theater's bargain night.
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Mar 20, 2005 18:24
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I enjoyed the hell out of the original Ring (at least the first time I saw it). While I wasn't expecting to enjoy The Ring 2 as much as the original, I was at least hopeful that I'd enjoy it at least a little bit. I was pretty dissapointed. As the second reviewer noted, a lot of the stuff in the movie could only be understood by a hardcore Ring fan. I'm not one of those, as I only saw the movie a couple times in the theater. Most of the events of this movie felt contrived to me. I actually thought the deer were cool, although I would've liked to know what their motive was. The movie never explained that. The ending was also pretty lame. 2/5.
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Mar 21, 2005 22:37
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There is just so much wrong with this movie. The first movie built up suspense and kept you at the edge of your seat. It set up simple rules at the beginning and really didn't falter from them until the change-up at the end. The end was definitely the highlight of the movie as it was both disturbing and thought-provoking. No candy-coated ending, no Deus Ex Machina, just a good ol' fashioned grand finale to leave you with something to think about as you walked out of that theater. The whole movie was one rich tapestry, things linked logically. I made the connection between the tape's "seven days" and how long one could survive in a well before the movie spelt it out for me; things like this make the audience feel smart and make the movie appear smart and it works out for everyone. The Ring TwO relied on cheap scares and inventing random poo poo just so the story had somewhere to go. Everytime Samara did something new I'd just go "What the gently caress? How the hell can she do that?" No explanations, no links to the lore of series, no anything, just total random nonsense to give a cheap shock. They had to invent stuff just for the series to go into a sequel, and it just wasn't enough for me to suspend my disbelief. The ending was HORRIBLE. Action one-liners, deus ex machina (aka resolution that no one expected and makes no sense), the whole deal. Just lame. I'll give the movie a few points. The Deer attack, while lacking in the CGI department, was at least a cool concept. The horrid, water-ruined corpses made a good return, though they were a little more cartoony this time and therefore not as creepy. The guy in the truck had a truly gruesome face, but it was just so animated in its grotesqueness that it seemed fake. Might just be me. The spider-walk up the well wall was creepy, even if it didn't make any sense within the overall plot. My favorite scene was the opener, with the kid trying to trick some girl who had a crush on him into watching the tape so he'd be able to live. This was a smart scene, taking stuff from the original movie and putting it in an original and disturbing context. It was disturbing in a whole new way, and was a logical progression from the first movie as one of my remaining questions from the first film was about how subsequent people would deal with the tape and if people would try to pawn it off on others to save themselves. The first was an amazing horror film. This sequel is mass-market drivel, very little aside from cheap scares.
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Mar 23, 2005 06:43
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I thought the first American Ring was quite entertaining becuase it was the opposite of what the original Japanese one and the Ring Two are in terms of content. In the Japanese Ring, if a plot point needs developing, typically the "psychic" father will simply state why something is happening or what needs to be done. How convenient. The American Ring fixed this by having the lead character actually having to do hands on investigative work every step of the way, and the pacing and plot development were handled well. There was a fairly well defined set of circumstances as to what Samarra could do and why. The sequel throws this out, instead deciding to have a Freddy style character that's always hanging around, hassling people from time to time to make sure we don't drift off becuase the actual substance of the plot is boring as gently caress. Scenes without direct supernatural interference in the first (ie the room in the barn) managed to be spooky without having to have Samarra jump out of the closet screaming boo at the top of her lungs. Now it relies more on tricks that every other supernatural horror movie ever made has relied on. The power failing at the most inopportune times, the spooky "It was all a dream!" segments, and other sleep inducing cliches. It is probably much easier to write a movie where you can make up the rules as you go along as to how to fight Samarra, but it also makes it far less interesting when the antagonist moves from well defined into the same stock-bad-guy-moves from other movies of this type. I enjoyed the first American Ring quite a bit, but this one was as loose as a Dublin Whore so far as structure and reasoning goes 2/5
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Mar 24, 2005 14:58
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Walking out of the movie I felt like I had watched someone play Silent Hill 2 for two hours -- some neat character and scenic design, but the plot was trying WAY TOO HARD to be tragically artistic that it ruined the whole thing, and there was a curious absence of anything you could call "scary." This movie stumbles right out of the gate, as Samara starts to appear in the flesh out of nowhere and in no conjunction with televisions or the videotape. That immediately destroys what was so scary about Samara from the first movie: she was less a boogeyman and more a malevolent psychic remnant of a girl who was killed by her mother, whose only method of communication with the outside world was through the videotape that had inadvertently been recorded by a VCR located conveniently above her watery grave. She had rules that she needed to operate by and she had an objective, she was not some hateful ghost who could go and come as she pleased, who could track people down at a country fair in the Oregonian countryside and appear randomly in people's bathtubs. Further, Samara was treated as a sympathetic character in the first Ring. I liked this. In this movie, Samara is just another movie villain, out for blood and revenge. This made the well scene awful. Samara looked like a teenage boy (specifically, a featured extra from the movie "People Under the Stairs") instead of a haunting little girl, and her last cry of "MOMMY" was so noticably distorted that I couldn't take it seriously. There are no real scares here, and dragging people into the television to kill them stopped being scary after Poltergeist III. Also, the plot raped Dark Water.  2/5
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Mar 25, 2005 20:10
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I really, really enjoyed The Ring. The Ring 2, I couldn't make myself enjoy. I fell asleep six times during it-- I missed about 30 minutes of the film. Even some of the most 'creepy' scenes I could feel myself about to pass out during. I never, ever sleep in movies-- this means something. It was really, really bad. I will give credit where credit is due, the CG Deer (antelope?) were cool but looked unrealistic, it was freaky but didn't MAKE SENSE. Why the hell was the scene there? Same for the water/bathtub scene. Great CG work but it didn't make any sense at all, and didn't add to the movie at all. Being dragged into a TV was entirely cliche by the end of the film and not really scary at all, and it felt like a cheap add-on pack to the original, with no real new elements at all. A rough rehash moneymaker. Oh well. Rating: 1/5.
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Mar 26, 2005 06:51
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Absolute garbage cash in sequel. Horrible horrible film, and I really enjoyed the first. I am pissed to have even seen it. Amazingly, they took the most horrifying thing from the first movie...the 'face'...and in this movie is it done so incredibly badly that it was pretty funny. Every time a character was shown with 'the face', a pretty audible chuckle eminated from the half asleep audience. How do you gently caress something that previously scary up? Jesus. If 'The Ring' was the Beatles, this movie was loving Yoko Ono. Stay the gently caress away from this film. 0.5 Captain-Obvious fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Mar 26, 2005 |
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Mar 26, 2005 07:25
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What a bad, bad film. Everything you will have liked about the first Ring -- its clever dialogue, its legitimately disturbing scenes, its actually interesting characters -- was left out of this one. Some scenes were put in for seemingly no reason connected to the plot (specifically the Deer scene -- what the gently caress?) whereas others played off of scares from the first film (which here, even if you saw them for the first time, would seem cheesy as poo poo. Whoever the director was for this, who I'm told is the original Ringu director but I don't remember if that's true or not, was mindblowingly bad at Ring-esque thrills). And like I said, the compelling characters are gone. Totally, completely absent from this one. Rachael (played by Naomi Watts who despite being qt could not redeem this film) is reduced to your everyday dumb horror movie chick; Samara is changed from an interesting, refreshing 'bad guy' you can actually symphathize with to your everyday dumb horror movie boogeyman (or boogeygirl, I suppose); and Aidan is... well I guess he was already your everyday dumb horror movie haunted kid, but he's pretty much the focus of this film which is just a bad, bad decision, considering the actor. I'm giving it a 1/5. The only reason I didn't give it a 0.5 was because that spot is reserved for Envy and I have yet to find a movie have enjoyed less (not even this, which again is saying a lot, save your $8.50 and buy a used fleshlight instead).
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Mar 27, 2005 03:30
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I really didn't enjoy this movie very much. I thought that the pacing was bad, and that the "scares" were mostly recycled from the first movie. Plus I hate that little kid. There were a few good moments though, so it wasn't a total waste. The syringe of air in the neck part was cool, and I laughed heartily at "I'm not your loving mommy!". Also, Lumbergh was in it! I give it a 1.5/5, plus a little bit for Lumbergh.
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Mar 27, 2005 07:13
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This movie was not good. The 2nd half was a lot more interesting than the first half, but not nearly enough to save it.quote:I will give credit where credit is due, the CG Deer (antelope?) were cool but looked unrealistic, it was freaky but didn't MAKE SENSE. Why the hell was the scene there? Same for the water/bathtub scene. Great CG work but it didn't make any sense at all, and didn't add to the movie at all. I think it was somehow tied to all the antlers in the basement, but still doesn't make any sense. The bathtub scene, that is where the girl possessed the boy. I didn't get the whole "she only wants a mommy thing". If she just wanted a mommy, why was she killing everyone 
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Mar 29, 2005 00:25
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This movie was hilarious. If you look at it as a horror movie, then it is quite possibly the worst one I have ever seen. Comedy-wise, though, it's gold. Comedy score: 4/5 Horror score: .5/5
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Mar 29, 2005 04:54
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Bad, bad, bad. The original never stopped with the suspense and weirdness. The second started out with it and then let it completely die. There were SOOO many parts where I just wanted to yell "COME ON ALREADY, DO SOMETHING". Some parts were so boring. That is my main beef with this, the original, even in its most boring parts was still creepy, and very rarely stopped the action. There was almost nothing in the second one that lives up to the first. And this is coming from a huge Ring fanboy. I did, however think the deer scene was cool. Overall, 1/5, if the deer scene wasnt there it would be a 0 Beve Stuscemi fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Mar 29, 2005 |
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Mar 29, 2005 23:35
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:10 |
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This movie is highly underrated. I went in expected a lame sequel and was presently surprised at how many times it scared the crap out of me. And I've seen almost every horror movie there is to see, so it takes a lot to scare me. One of the things that made the movie for me was the great performance by the child actor. His "dual" performance, especially as far as facial expressions, was pretty drat creepy and kept me on edge. And while it looked kind of cheesy at times, the special effects with Samara were just plain freaky, especially the well scene. The only thing I'll side with the haters on was the moose scene. Definitely amateur looking. But I will admit it is one the all-time classic "wtf" moments in all of film. I wholeheartedly recommend this film, and I recommend watching it late at night and in the dark for full effect ... as you should do with any horror film in my opinion. 4/5
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Sep 22, 2005 12:02
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