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The Ring Two keeps the same screenwriter (Ehren Kruger) and production team as the first, but switches out Gore Verbinski for Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Ringu and the first of its sequels Ringu 2. This is actually, then, a slightly novel twist on the cliché of a foreign director overseeing an English language remake of his film (re: Ole Bornedal and the ‘94/’97 versions of Nightwatch): Nakata helmed a sequel to a film that wasn’t a remake of his sequel, (though The Ring was slavishly faithful to the plot outline of Ringu) and made his English language debut to boot. (I should at this point declare I have seen relatively little J-horror.)

At various times, The Ring Two reminded me of such disparate chapter two horror/fantasy films as Exorcist II: The Heretic, Freddy’s Revenge: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and Back to the Future II. The parallel with Exorcist II is that it revels in incomprehension while staying true to its own gonzo vision of an afflicted child thought to be cured succumbing to forces that have possessed him or her (and also the general critical thrashing it received and being viewed as a box office disappointment). The connection with Freddy’s Revenge is that The Ring Two is also a beast of duality. It’s at once a sequel that picks up after and has a direct connection to its predecessor, and also one that departs from the path it initially leads audiences down to pursue other tangents (successfully or not can be argued). And like Back to the Future II, it revisits some of the same moments and themes of the first film (in particular Rachel’s journey during the climax) but does so in the context of a much darker and cynical tone.

I don’t know if I can bluntly say whether I prefer The Ring Two to The Ring. I can be decisive in defending it against the drubbing it took at the time from the critics and its financial shortcomings in regards to the first. The Ring opened with $15.5 million and parlayed incredible word-of-mouth into a long run and a $130 million total. The Ring Two, on the basis of that goodwill, opened with $35.5 million, and then cratered, winding up with barely over two times that amount for a final tally of $76 million.

If it was expected that The Ring Two would be more of the same (and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t), then defeated expectations could be responsible for that lingering backlash. With the emphasis less on scares and chills (there is no new equivalent to the videotape) and more on an ominous tone that seeps into everything, it doesn’t go for jolts to the system. The only sequence that comes close to that is also, I would imagine, one of the most divisive: the attack on Rachel and Aidan, inside their compact car, by scores of berserk elk.

There is precedence for this (think of the horse on the ferry in The Ring who is driven to suicide by Rachel’s presence), but seeing a mass of (not top-notch) CGI wildlife with a crazed look in their eye walks a fine line between gonzo and laughable. As someone who grew up in the middle of a national forest, I perhaps find it more unnerving than most, but also appreciate Nakata’s staging of the event, particularly the just-over-the-top-enough moment where an elk struck by the car is hurled overhead, its antler rack slicing into the roof of the car and coming dangerously close to impaling mother and son.

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