New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

The finale, even if it is cribbed from the Japanese original Ringu, is one climax too much. When Samara is shown emerging from the television to claim the life of reporter Rachel Keller’s (Naomi Watts) ex-husband, it diminishes the monster. The CGI is admirably rendered. It is not an issue of phoniness. It’s more an example of showing too much, or giving the demon too much “freedom” (I would always argue that the caged Hannibal Lecter was more frightening than the one on the loose). I guess we should be grateful that it is never explicitly shown what exactly Samara does to turn her victim’s faces into the elongated gaping grimace/rictus that defines them in their death. Additionally, by going on 15 minutes too long and gunning for the final twist - that what Rachel achieves by discovering the truth of Samara’s death isn’t to set her soul at rest but unleash her evil into the world - leaves too much time for questions to be raised. The first and foremost of the questions is: Why for the love of god couldn’t Rachel’s son Aidan (David Dorfman), who has a psychic/spiritual connection to Samara, have clued everyone in a little earlier to the fact that Samara is evil?

What both The Ring and The Ring Two achieve successfully, first and foremost, is a bait and switch on the audience via their bravura opening sequences (which would be the pre-credit or pre-title sequences under most circumstances), each of which becomes a hard act for the rest of the film to follow. The Ring’s six-minute opening - with two female teens in schoolgirl uniforms home alone and freaking each other out in a bout of gotcha one-upmanship - suggests that this will be another tale of (soon to be) dead teenagers. Instead it becomes a portrait of two dysfunctional and broken nuclear families in tandem (albeit one significantly more fucked up than the other, what with the attempted infanticide, lots of dead horses, several suicides.)

The Ring Two’s 12 minute opening set piece begins with two teens as well (male/female this time) and after marvelously skirting any sense of dread or horror for the first half, ramps up the tension and goes for the jugular, becoming especially witty in its equation of being goaded into watching the video with being talked into sex or intimacy before one is ready. Nonetheless, it makes the case that this will be another tale of a certain videotape wreaking havoc and leading to death (one week removed) for anyone who views it. But by the 30-minute mark, the videotape is no more and it becomes apparent that The Ring Two is concerned with an evil that has crossed over from outside boundaries (the televisual and the dream life in this case) into our waking world, in some cases taking hold inside of us.

(Sidebar 1: It also occurs to me that Rachel’s destruction of the videotape and the dead end of that as a plot hook could be a quite unsubtle reference to the death knell for videotapes in the marketplace around the time of The Ring Two’s release. If a reboot is ever attempted, will videotape seem too retro or just implausible? Will the makers attempt to use some digital form of transmission? I can’t envision how that would work. There is something inherently scary about what might be on an unlabeled videocassette and particularly the fear that one might be forced to watch it or to have no control over watching it, which has been exploited by everything from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to Robert Scott’s The Video Dead, although that in name only perhaps. In contrast, there is nothing remotely unsettling about the format of a disc - the circularity, the sleekness, the fact that it can be used as a coaster, all render it unintimidating.)

Continued:       1       2       3       4