The Ring Two (unrated edition)

(2005)

"Fear comes full circle."

New rentals! We are prone to avoiding the theater and waiting to rent, and I grabbed this sequel, newly avaialable to rent, thinking "Oh, this will be good!"

Well, I'll make this brief and to the point. First off, in order to even begin to understand "The Ring Two", you need to have first seen the original. Which I did, and I thought the original one was scary as hell, and a very good film. But just because you saw the first one that doesn't mean you need to waste your time seeing this boring, un-scary sequel, which suffers most from poor direction and editing.

The plot: Naomi Watts reprises her role from "The Ring", determined to make a new life with her son, but the evil Samara returns. SURPRISE!

I don't know what "chilling new scenes" (as it says on the DVD box) this unrated version contains, but if the unrated version is supposed to be scarier than the rated one, that makes it even worse. This film is just not scary. In fact, my husband and I found ourselves laughing at many of the supposedly-scary scenes.

For instance: in the first film the director wasn't trying to scare the audience with computer-animated deer. And the only thing less scary than deer are computer-animated deer. That whole scene seemed to be just a lame imitation of the final scene from the Hitchcock classic "The Birds". We were laughing the entire time.

And how did Naomi Watts' character keep her (creepy-looking) little boy clean, if he's so damn phobic of tubs, showers, toilets and even faucets? Damn, kid, take a bath and wash your stanky little self! Oh no! Scared of the bath tub too? Well, Mom will just leave you alone in the tub, you'll be fine. What could happen?

This slow, predictable, boring, barely-a-horror-movie movie is long on closeups of Watts' face, and short on scary Samara.

See the original, but skip this one.