Ringu 2 (1999)

While investigating the horrifying death of her boyfriend mai takano learns about a videotape haunted by a spirit of a disturbing girl named sadako which kills anyone who watches it exactly one week later. When her boyfriends son starts to develop the same psychic abilities as sadako mai must save him. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 08/23/2005 Starring: Miki Nakatani Rikiya Otaka Run time: 95 minutes Rating: Nr Product Description

Effectively Creepy

I am in the unique position of watching Ringu 2 without having seen the first film. But I did see both English versions of "The Ring." I liked Rikiya Otaka as Yoichi. He seemed alternately vulnerable and scary as the little boy. The sequence where he knocks the policeman down was simple but powerful. Miki Nakatani plays Mai Takano, the assistant to Hiroyuki Sanada's character. The actress seemed to play it safe and never generated a great deal of emotion despite the weird scenarios like the TV's going crazy in the mental institution. Hitomi Sato plays Masami Kurahashi who was a schoolmate under the power of Sadako. She was scary in her brief appearances. That scene where she's holding out her hand to Mai and begging for help was scary. If Mai had taken the hand, it wouldn't have surprised me to have her sucked into the TV, which might have been more interesting. Fumiyo Kohinata plays Dr. Kawajiri, the psychologist. I liked his character very much as one of the supporting roles. I thought his corpse floated on the water in a most flattering manner. Kenjiro Ishimaru played the police detective. He was interesting as the crusty gumshoe whose investigation was more barrier to Mai than help. In his flashback scenes, Hiroyuki Sanada is amazing. He won the Japanese Best Actor award for The Twilight Samurai and always gives a deep performance. For me, the weakness of the second film was that it was so dependent on the first in order to understand the story. If it'd been written to stand on its own legs a bit more, I would have been less confused. Overall, it was an effectively creepy piece. The well scenes were scary. Enjoy! March 18, 2008

Take this ring and toss it

It started out pretty good...it was engrossing and interesting...then it lost all sence about the time the little boy shot a psychic blow and knocked a cop down. Then he ran like hell with his mother and somehow she gets hit by a bus...and no one gets off the bus to see what happened. The boy just watches the blood run down the street. That made no sence.

Then it went to hell in a handbaskey FAST!I honestly don't know which was more boring...the Japanese or the American versions. Or which offered the most off the wall scenerios and wanted us to believe it fit the story.

May 3, 2007

Strike three.

You hate to see good movies exploited into multiple sequels of varying worth, all of which tend to reflect poorly on the original. The Exorcist, Rocky, and Thomas Harris's character of Hannibal Lecter come to mind. We have a not-so-new group to add to this, and that's the Ringu Anthology of Terror (Rasen/Ringu/Ringu 2/Ringu 0).

Ringu was a good movie. To an unsuspecting American audience, it reinvigorated the horror genre, which year-after-year churns out more garbage than a sewage plant. But Ringu 0 failed in its attempt to bring Sadako to life in a satisfying manner. We saw her, a rather demure figure, but the explanation provided for her backstory was neither persuasive nor reasonable. There was, for those interested, a different explanation in the book that did make a bit more sense, but given the overall quality of the film, I doubt that it would have made a difference. Sadako does creep us out in the end with her disjointed zombie/skeleton walk, and it's unsettling, but two seconds of unsettling film doesn't cut it.

Rasen, the original sequel to Ringu, the two films released concurrently, gave us answers to how Sadako spread the curse, but the film degenerated into such unbelievable ridiculousness that they decided another sequel was in order, so here we are with Ringu 2.

Like Rasen, this picks up where Ringu left off. But instead of introducing a new character, it focuses on Ryuji's girlfriend, who we met briefly in Ringu, Mai. It also completely dismisses Rasen, as if the film never existed. Key plot elements that happen in Rasen don't happen here, and we see much of Yoichi, who we know from past films (one of them being Rasen, mainly) inherited his father's telepathy. Like Rasen, Ringu 2 attempts to explain Sadako and the curse. We learn that Sadako was alive for about twenty-eight of the thirty years that she was entombed in the well, although how she survived without food is anybody's guess.

This film fails for the same reason that Rasen failed - it tried to define the paranormal.

I've now seen all four films that comprise the Ringu Anthology of Terror, and am unsatisfied. They should have stopped with Ringu.

It doesn't seem that we're getting the picture on this side of the ocean either, as another Ring movie is being made. The second movie didn't do as well as the first, critically or financially.

1 1/2 stars.
April 29, 2007

The final Ringu

The first "Ringu" was a superb horror film that really didn't need a sequel. Hideo Nakata, who directed both films, seems to understand that the less we see of Sadako, the ghostly villain of this series, the scarier she is. However, that fundamental truth is directly at odds with the production of more films about her. This installment is mostly dull and incoherent. It becomes silly at times, such as the sequence in which a scientist attempts to drain the "Sadako energy" from a cursed victim into a swimming pool. I can't recall a single film that has successfully wedded empirical scientific method to the supernatural; it always comes off looking ridiculous. Having seen the entire Ringu cycle now, I can say that they--and you--should stop after the first film. April 21, 2007

A decent yet over-complicated attempt at a sequel.

After "Ringu" knocked my socks off a few years ago, I was very much looking forward to the sequel, but not really sure where they were going to take the story. It would have been all too easy to simply take the Sadako character after the immense impact she had to the climax of the first film, and make a horror movie where she goes on a rampage of death and destruction. As it turned out, the creators took a much more subtle approach, choosing to continue with the first films creepy atmosphere and mystery. Unfortunately, "Ringu 2" doesn't match up to the original on almost any level and I feel it massively overcomplicates the scenario.

The good news is that the film "feels" very much like the first one. Nearly all of the actors have returned and the story just continues exactly where it left off. The police are still trying to figure out what is behind the strange deaths and who the body that was found in the well belonged to. Scientists are also looking into the phenomena, which brings a different spin to it. One of the survivors from "Ringu" can be found in the psychiatric ward, petrified by TVs. Reiko (the star of the first film) and Yoichi (the little boy) are also involved, and this all makes "Ringu 2" a living, breathing part of the series. The challenge was always going to be finding a way to scare the audience a second time and this is where I feel they have failed. But not through a lack of trying!

With "Ringu", once you accepted that someone would die a week after viewing the tape, the rest of the film (apart from one of the main character's ability to read minds to move to plot forward) was intensely frightening and real. The second film unfortunately takes further liberties, with another couple of characters suddenly gaining special powers and Sadako starting to appear in random scenes for shock value alone. A character that died in the first movie appears as an apparition to help Mai and the little boy appears as an apparition even though he is still alive. This just doesn't work as well in my opinion with the viewer's ability to suspend disbelief made far more difficult. I can't help but think they should have stuck to the world they'd created in the first movie, without over-complicating things. There's no need to explain how Sadako does what she does and yet they spend far too much time analysing it instead of letting her mystery and shocking appearance do its work.

These flaws included, I still found the film to be somewhat creepy and mildly entertaining. The minimalist approach to music and sound still works well. The acting is passable in the most but certainly not exceptional. I don't completely understand everything that happened, particularly towards the end but I get the general idea. It's simply another case where the cast and crew have made a decent, honourable attempt at a sequel, yet fallen a fair way short of the original, which turns out to be exactly what happened to the American remakes as well. November 7, 2006

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