Starring: Naomi Watts, David Dorfman (I), Sissy Spacek, Simon Baker (I)

4 out of 10 stars:

The Ring Two is narratively out-of-step with its predecessor, and crippled by a screenplay that's heavy on family psychodrama and light on the jarring horror for which I waited two and a half years to indulge in. Hideo Nataka, in his first English-language picture, provides memorable visual achievements, but his work is underserved by writer Ehren Kruger, who errs heavily on the side of illogical.

Who doesn't remember The Ring's Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts), the Seattle journalist whose relationship to a deadly videocassette and its star, a little girl named Samara, cost her boyfriend his life, and almost claimed Rachel's and her son's. The Ring Two finds Rachel and her boy Aidan (David Dorfman) settling into an even more depressing city, Astoria, Oregon; this time Rachel is wisely keeping a suitor, her co-worker Max (Simon Baker), at arm's length, as she is focused on her and Aidan's well-being. Their comfort comes relatively easy at first, as no one in Astoria, despite its close proximity to Seattle, seems to be aware of their harrowing past.

While it's hard to see how that news didn't travel, it's mind boggling to watch how the death of a high school-aged Astoria boy, who succumbs to a new copy of the infamous cassette, affects no one save the Kellers. There's a teenager with a stretched face in a bodybag and a house full of water ... must be time to get back to work at the shop. The incident marks Samara's return, and for some reason (maybe because she went through the trouble of crossing state lines) she's now less interested in killing and more focused on seeking a human host to occupy. Aidan, are you listening?

What follows is a overwrought drama that relies fully on Watts's handling of dubious scenarios, with liberal doses of exposition and, bizarrely enough, action hero dialogue ("That was totally from Aliens," said my viewing companion). In her continuing research into Samara's past, Rachel is cornered as a potential mental patient/abusive mother as she, after a visit to the old horse farm, gets closer to the girl's roots, and just maybe a way to stop her forever. Offering up more of the plot would rob you from the maddening experience of wondering how The Ring Two was allowed to go into production with this script. But I will say that the long, flat, uninteresting scenes are stitched together by Nataka's penchant for water-based special effects, which are just distracting enough to provide a sense of fear before we're dragged back into the narrative. Watts and Dorfman do their best; brief appearances by Elizabeth Perkins and Sissy Spacek both disappoint, as Perkins is part of a malnourished subplot, and Spacek is required to turn in an intense scene far, far into a dead production.

With the ending comes the relief that, if this serial were to continue, it would, like Ringu 0: Bāsudei, have to be a prequel. Comforting is the feeling that this probably will not happen.

I believe a wondrous thing happened with The Ring; it took Japanese horror out of the speciality video store and into the cineplex. Sure, Hollywood snapped up remake rights like they knew all along that the genre was going to be big, but rep houses played the original films and studios put some of them out on DVD. Despite being PG-13, The Ring was nightmare-inducing. It became a pop culture event without the nauseating marketing; it wasn't turned into a TV show or a line of toys, and people didn't get "The Rachel" hairstyle (or, for that matter, "The Samara"). It made Naomi Watts a superstar. And most of all, it made us anticipate a sequel.

Unfortunately, The Ring Two is nothing but a studio's desperation to make bank off of their live-action division, and little more.