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When I first entertained the idea in 2009 of penning a column like Chapter Two, it was a sequel like The Ring Two that I had in mind. And this was based solely on my recollections - four years after the fact - of what my reaction had been. I initially wrote about it in 2005 for a friend’s website after seeing an advance screening. (And I now wish I had done a better job of keeping my archives as both the website and the disk format I had that and many other columns saved on are now defunct.) I recalled befuddlement but not hatred, intrigue but not astonishment, several lyrical and/or crazy-ass scenes standing out in the middle of an unsettling, but not necessarily - if contrasted with the first - “creepy” plot flow. Surely this would have been a film that I would have wanted to get my second opinion of sooner rather than later?

Any thoughts that I had of renting it on DVD when it came out for a second viewing were squelched (perversely, I admit), by the listed running time of the unrated edition. As I recall, this was a stretch of time when I was disgusted/fed up/pissed off with every film passing off unrated editions that amounted to little more than a minute of footage that in all probability had been approved by the MPAA but then pulled out at the last moment by the studio to allow for . . . an unrated edition. (Feel free to mock both me and the cynicism-fed high horse I rode in on.)

When I saw the running time of 128 minutes on the back, I blanched. I knew the theatrical cut had been about 110 minutes. I also knew that there was a short film entitled Rings, intended as a bridge between the two Ring films, on the disc and that it ran about 17 minutes. What I deduced was that Rings was included in that new running time and that any new footage amounted to a minute if not mere second. Seven years late, I can cop to being ridiculously wrong. And to clarify how wrong, I didn’t notice any of the new scenes or slightly altered existing scenes in the unrated cut (post-screening, I went to a website that does side by side analysis of unrated and theatrical versions) and up until the 100-minute mark, I was still thinking I was in the right. More on all that shortly.

I also screened The Ring again for the first time in several years, almost in disbelief that the 10th anniversary of its release had passed. I remember seeing that with my first wife and a friend of hers, in what I recall was an early screening the weekend before to drum up word-of-mouth. My reaction to my viewing last weekend is fairly similar to what it was a decade ago, and indeed, the several viewings in the interim: serious goosebumps are raised in the first half, and then the film becomes too much like a Scooby-Doo mystery: intent on explaining concretely every abstract image in the videotape, thereby diminishing a lot of its mindfuck bizarreness.

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