Review #38: The Ring twO (2005)

This review was originally written in October 2017.

Horror Movie October day 9- The Ring twO

I remember watching The Ring in theaters when it first came out, and I remember absolutely loving it (or, at the very least, it terrified me so much I remember having difficulty even just talking about it with friends a few days later). Since this was around the time I started getting interested in horror movies, for a long time The Ring was the last movie that I could remember truly scaring me. So, when it occurred to me that it's been twelve years and I had still never watched the sequel, I thought, what better time?

Frankly, I wish I hadn't. This movie was bad. Really bad. To start, Naomi Watts (who is very good in lots of other movies, including Funny Games, which I just watched the other day and came out around this time) is just awful in this. Second, the kid who plays her son does an awful job as well- for the first half of the movie his only expression is "look of bemusement" and for the second half his only expression is "grin because you're a creepy kid and creepy kids grin". Was it the actors, or was it the director? You tell me. Third, the movie begins with some kids showing up dead after having watched the killer video tape, which does two things for the movie: 1. it causes the viewer think that the plot is going to involve stopping the tapes from being circulated, and 2. it causes the main characters to question whether they did the right thing at the end of the first movie by copying the tape and giving it to someone else (basically, causing someone else to die so that they may live). The problem, though, is that neither of these goes anywhere. The investigation stops after the first like ten minutes, and after that one moment the characters never question anything they do for the rest of the movie (which I'll get to in a moment).

The biggest issue with this movie though? It's that this movie sets up all sorts of consequences and fails to deliver on them. It's one of those movies that you HAVE to ask what the crap happens immediately after the cameras stop rolling. Imagine this: A woman brings her son to the emergency room with hypothermia, after the guy she's staying with watched her (apparently) trying to drown him in the bathtub. While in the hospital, they find all sorts of bruises on his body, so the hospital (rightly so) accuses the mother of abuse and forbids her from visiting him. Except then, a day or two later, the kid's doctor dies IN THE HOSPITAL ROOM, apparently from suicide, and the kid goes missing (though I'm sure cameras show him strolling out of the hospital unescorted).

Surely the cops go to investigate the child's mother, right? She's already accused of abuse and now it's easy to imagine she somehow killed the doctor and kidnapped the child, right? Well, what happens when the cops show up at the woman's house and there's A DEAD GUY in a truck sitting outside, and a simple glance in the front window shows the child sitting on the couch watching cartoons? And maybe they get some backup and kick the door down and find the mother trying to drown her son (again!)- how is she supposed to explain that one?

Well, the cops never show up because this movie apparently forgot the stakes that they set up earlier. But there is NO way, no what WHATSOEVER, that the immediate scene after the credits roll isn't the two main characters fleeing from the cops. No way. At the very least someone is going to be walking by the house and see a straight-up corpse in the front seat of that truck, and then realize that the house belongs to a woman who is linked to a dead doctor and a kidnapped child.

"No, officer, you have to understand, there was a ghost girl on this video tape and she possessed my son because her own mother tried to drown her child and I'm not crazy, no not at all, I've got witnesses that saw me at this insane asylum right after I broke into this farm house and stole some luggage, hey have you ever seen this tape that makes you die after seven days?"

Final Rating: 2/10 climbing chase scenes

Two Names I've Heard Far Too Many Times in the Last 128 Minutes: Rachel and Aidan