Never judge a horror movie until the sun has risen afterwards. I saw "Ring" and "Ring 2" in one night, and I was impressed (not to mention suitably chilled) by both, even if the second WAS a bit of an incoherent mess. A night's sleep and a morning stroll to the shops afterwards, the full truth was obvious: the original "Ring" is a modern classic, perhaps even a masterpiece, terrifying and coherent and beautifully formed; the second is an unexciting rip-off of no particular merit. Whatever virtues it has it borrows from the first. It's not so much that it makes no sense unless you've seen "Ring" first - it makes no sense anyway - rather, the scary things are only scary the second time round because they were scary the first; remove the experience of watching the original "Ring" and there's nothing left.
Part of the problem which Hideo Nakata faced was that this kind of stuff works best, and often only works at all, when the audience is placed in exactly the same position as the protagonists. We start "Ring" in ignorance. Presently we learn that somewhere out there is a fatal videotape; from the moment you finish watching it, you have a week left to live. The heroine watches the tape. (As she watches it, we watch it, too.) She now has a week to live, and, without a single day being spared, we live through that week as she struggles to avoid her fate, or at the very least to understand more of it, by finding out all she can about the origin of the tape. As she learns, we learn. Only at the very end, after she has mysteriously survived and her husband has mysteriously died, is she given the final piece of information (those who haven't seen "Ring" shouldn't be reading this in the first place): that someone who has seen the tape CAN cheat death, but only by making a copy of the tape and persuading someone else to watch it. No better ending could have been devised. Dramatically and emotionally apt, it also explains a few things: why anyone could be so cruel as to make her son to watch the tape, and why the quality of the tape is so horribly degraded (it's not JUST because it's creepier that way, or because people watching the tape feel compelled to huddle up close to the televsion screen in order to see it clearly).
BUT... now that we know that people who have seen the tape have an easy escape clause, we won't be able to feel their fear so keenly ever again. This doesn't mean that the first "Ring" won't have the same effect on us if we watch it a second time; I suspect it will, since it's always possible to return to the initial position of ignorance. But we can't adopt that position at the start of the SECOND movie. How, then, is Nakata going to scare us?
Partly by direct borrowing: We remember how terrifying the videotape footage is, so we jump when it makes a reappearance; we know how terrifying Sadako is, with her hair completely covering her face and her ungainly, bestial, unstoppable gait - in fact, she's terrifying IN HERSELF, in whatever context she appears, although not one of her scenes here can begin to compare with the one in the original "Ring" in which she crawls out of the television set - so we jump whenever we see HER. Partly Nakata simply keeps the original film's atmosphere intact, so that we know it takes place in the same world, which is frightening enough. But his main way of keeping things going is to throw in whatever he can think of. In addition to the minimal paraphernalia of the first film, we have a SECOND video ghost, a possibly possessed child, telekinesis, spirit photography, hallucinations, dimension doors ... in short, randomly chosen, tried-and-true horror hand-me-downs which reek of desperation. One gets the impression that Nakata would have thrown in vampires, too, if he'd thought that they'd help.
The sad thing is that despite its weakness and triviality the film still runs rings (so to speak) around its contemporary Western counterparts, the worn-to-death cliché of the thirty-seventh "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the pathetically inept attempted innovation of "The Blair Witch Project".
Part of the problem which Hideo Nakata faced was that this kind of stuff works best, and often only works at all, when the audience is placed in exactly the same position as the protagonists. We start "Ring" in ignorance. Presently we learn that somewhere out there is a fatal videotape; from the moment you finish watching it, you have a week left to live. The heroine watches the tape. (As she watches it, we watch it, too.) She now has a week to live, and, without a single day being spared, we live through that week as she struggles to avoid her fate, or at the very least to understand more of it, by finding out all she can about the origin of the tape. As she learns, we learn. Only at the very end, after she has mysteriously survived and her husband has mysteriously died, is she given the final piece of information (those who haven't seen "Ring" shouldn't be reading this in the first place): that someone who has seen the tape CAN cheat death, but only by making a copy of the tape and persuading someone else to watch it. No better ending could have been devised. Dramatically and emotionally apt, it also explains a few things: why anyone could be so cruel as to make her son to watch the tape, and why the quality of the tape is so horribly degraded (it's not JUST because it's creepier that way, or because people watching the tape feel compelled to huddle up close to the televsion screen in order to see it clearly).
BUT... now that we know that people who have seen the tape have an easy escape clause, we won't be able to feel their fear so keenly ever again. This doesn't mean that the first "Ring" won't have the same effect on us if we watch it a second time; I suspect it will, since it's always possible to return to the initial position of ignorance. But we can't adopt that position at the start of the SECOND movie. How, then, is Nakata going to scare us?
Partly by direct borrowing: We remember how terrifying the videotape footage is, so we jump when it makes a reappearance; we know how terrifying Sadako is, with her hair completely covering her face and her ungainly, bestial, unstoppable gait - in fact, she's terrifying IN HERSELF, in whatever context she appears, although not one of her scenes here can begin to compare with the one in the original "Ring" in which she crawls out of the television set - so we jump whenever we see HER. Partly Nakata simply keeps the original film's atmosphere intact, so that we know it takes place in the same world, which is frightening enough. But his main way of keeping things going is to throw in whatever he can think of. In addition to the minimal paraphernalia of the first film, we have a SECOND video ghost, a possibly possessed child, telekinesis, spirit photography, hallucinations, dimension doors ... in short, randomly chosen, tried-and-true horror hand-me-downs which reek of desperation. One gets the impression that Nakata would have thrown in vampires, too, if he'd thought that they'd help.
The sad thing is that despite its weakness and triviality the film still runs rings (so to speak) around its contemporary Western counterparts, the worn-to-death cliché of the thirty-seventh "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the pathetically inept attempted innovation of "The Blair Witch Project".