Ring 2

Truly chilling this is not. Nakata's follow up to his modern masterpiece is a damp squib. It has a constant feeling of the morning after the party - a jumbled and unnecessary backstory to the original Ring that seems like it was assembled out of scraps from the cutting room floor.

It starts out promisingly enough, with a palpable air of dread hanging over proceedings, but it never kicks on; a washed out, glacially paced narrative is punctuated with moments of horror that are little more than shadows of the original film - tension is built before a payoff which is neither original nor particularly frightening.

The film culminates in a faintly ludicrous last act in which an odd assortment of characters including Mai, Sadako's father and a local professor attempt to syphon Sadako into a swimming pool using Reiko's son Yoichi as a conduit. Then things get really weird and Mai finds herself inside the infamous well, Yoichi on her back, scrambling to get away from a dodgy animatronic Sadako that looks like something from Jason and the Argonauts (complete with Homeric warning not to look back upon the underworld). A-ha! I thought, so this is how the well-dwelling Sadako survived for 30 years - she feeds on poor unfortunates who fall into her lair through holes in reality that she engineers - anticipating some grisly grand finale now. Disappointingly though, as she reaches Mai, we just get a cut to her sad papier mache face intoning the line 'Why are you the only one to be saved'? before falling back into the murky depths. Which is kind of a vignette of the whole film.

リング 2
Dir. Hideo Nakata, 1999