The Ring Two

Year 16, Day 288 - 10/14/24 - Movie #4,873

BEFORE: Naomi Watts is having a pretty good Movie Year, I must say, as she carries over from "The Ring", and she was also in two of the "Divergent" movies, and "Penguin Bloom" before that and "The International", "Ophelia" and "Infinite Storm" after.  So this makes EIGHT movies with her in this calendar year, which puts her on the big board, umm, let's say between Jason Statham and Mark Wahlberg, yeah, that seems about right for this year. It won't be long now until I close up shop for the late fall and re-open for the holidays, just like a hunting lodge. But after Christmas I'll break down who had the most appearances, from 12 down to 3 anyway.  Hundreds of actors and non-actors have appeared in two watched movies this year, I won't have space to list them all, so only those with three or more films in 2024 will get name-checked.  My rules, I make them up. 

But yeah, I'm watching both "Ring" movies within 24 hours, so that's a double dose. If I die six or seven days from now, you'll know what happened to me. 

THE PLOT: Six months after the incidents involving the lethal videotape, new clues prove that there is a new evil lurking in the darkness. 

AFTER: For some reason, teens are still watching that VHS tape that kills people, I guess because it's 2002 and most reality TV hasn't been invented yet, except for "Survivor" and maybe "Big Brother".  One guy named Jake watched the tape seven days ago, and he's desperately trying to get his girlfriend (?) to watch the tape, with just minutes to go before he somehow dies. Not cool, dude. Maybe she gets suspicious when he puts the tape on and leaves the room, or maybe he oversold how COOL it is to watch this scary tape that kills you.  Either way, he comes back in the room, thinking he's beaten the system, only to find out that Emily "watched" it with her eyes closed. Yeah, maybe Emily's not the sharpest knife in the drawer - OR, maybe she's smarter than we think, because she doesn't die at the hand of the evil ghost-demon Samara, he does.  Still, someone should probably explain to Emily how to watch a videotape. 

They never made a sequel to this film where the ghost-demon upgraded to DVD or BluRays?  Or since Samara died in the 1980's she doesn't understand that technology?  Man, I think we skated on this one because nobody's watching VHS tapes any more, except for me.  Thank God the evil ghost-demon who was thrown down a well doesn't understand how to get her movie on streaming platforms, but then again, from what I've seen, nobody really understands how that process works.  Anyway I don't think she'd make any money doing that, because nobody seems to be making money from streaming any more, Samara would be better off getting a YouTube channel, but then she really would need to promote it to get the required number of views, they keep sort of moving that goalpost and making it more difficult.  Welcome to the world of independent film distribution, evil ghost-demon!  

Anyway, Rachel and her son Aidan have moved from the Seattle area to a small town in Oregon, and Rachel's working for a local newspaper with a nice-guy editor, Max, who's a potential love interest for her, if all goes well and he doesn't get scared to death by an evil ghost-demon.  But come on, what are the odds of THAT happening?  Rachel hears about the new trend in Western Oregon, trying to get your girlfriend to watch a VHS tape that kills you, and she breaks into the crime scene to burn the videotape, so there you go, problem solved, movie over. But that also alerted Samara to Rachel's location, and the evil ghost-demon decides that inside Rachel's son Aidan would be a pretty cool place to hang out, so she enters him inside a gender-neutral restroom at the county fair.  

A bunch of deer try to attack their car on the way home, and honestly it's a bit unclear if the deer are being controlled by the demon, or if they can sense the demon and are trying to destroy it.  I suppose if a bunch of deer wreck your car it doesn't matter much what their motive is. But Aidan's body temperature starts to drop and bruises develop on his arms, and everyone in the hospital is convinced that Rachel is an abusive mother, because people don't just get instant hypothermia, not even in northern Oregon.  But since he's in the hospital this gives Rachel more time to investigate Samara's back-story even further - unlike in the previous film, where she just left her kid home alone with no supervision for long stretches of time.  

Rachel tracks down Samara's mother, who is somehow still alive despite giving birth in the 1950's (?) and tracks her down in a psychiatric hospital, which is where she's been since she tried to drown her own baby because the baby told her to.  Meanwhile, Samara/Aidan kills his doctor in the hospital and then just walks out and goes back to Max's house. Rachel figures out that Aidan is possessed because he calls her "Mommy", and before he was calling her by her first name.  Yeah, I tried that with my mother once when I was a kid and got in trouble for it. 

Apparently the only way to get Samara out of her son is to put sleeping pills in his jelly sandwiches, and then drown him in the bathtub, because Samara still has a fear of being drowned, even though she's dead.  Seems a bit weird because she can't drown AGAIN, but whatever. But this is just going to give mothers out there bad ideas, the movie's basically saying any time your ten-year-old is acting weird, just drown him in the bathtub, that'll fix it. Then it's just a simple matter of allowing herself to be pulled into the VHS world, climb out of a well before the super-fast ghost-demon, and close the lid on the well. What could be easier?  Now just get your soul back into your body and try to enjoy life, if you can.  

This franchise was WAY over-hyped, considering how much didn't happen in these two movies.  They sure tried to do a lot with a little, and the footage that kills you really just looked like a bad student film.  Anyway, that's another franchise crossed off the list, and I never have to circle back to this one, let's hope. This is what you get when the film's director and lead actress are contractually obligated to keep working on a sequel but just don't really want to be there. 

Also starring David Dorfman (also carrying over from "The Ring"), Simon Baker (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Kelly Stables (last heard in "Dolittle"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in "Kate"), Elizabeth Perkins (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Blockers"), Ryan Merriman (last seen in "42"), Emily VanCamp (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Kelly Overton, James Lesure (last seen in "Fire with Fire"), Chane't Johnson, Cooper Thornton (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Marilyn McIntyre (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Jesse Burch (last seen in "The Last Word"), Michael Chieffo (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Steve Petranca, Michael Dempsey, Kirk B.R. Woller (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Jeffrey Hutchinson (last seen in "Changeling"), Mary Joy (last seen in "The Rundown"), Michelle Anne Johnson, Teri Bibb, Jill Farley, Aleksa Palladino (last seen in "The Irishman"), Victor McCay (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Brendan Tomlinson, Phyllis Lyons (last seen in "The Bridges of Madison County"), Amy Haffner, Jonathan Coburn, Sherilyn Lawson (last seen in "Feast of Love") with archive footage of Daveigh Chase (also carrying over from "The Ring"), Shannon Cochran (ditto)

RATING: 3 out of 10 discounted VHS tapes at the county fair

The Ring

Year 16, Day 287 - 10/13/24 - Movie #4,872

BEFORE: I've got today off, last day off for a while, because I'm headed into Hell Week, aka New York Comic Con week.  I worked yesterday at the theater on a shift starting at 6 am, so that threw off my whole sleeping schedule, which is not good news going into NYCC week.  So I took a nap on Saturday afternoon when I came home, stayed up to watch "Quasi" but then overslept going into Sunday, which was my wife's birthday.  I'm glad I got us a dinner reservation for 6 pm and not earlier, as we seniors are likely to get.  Anyway, all of this put my movie watching on the back burner a bit, so I'm going to double-up on the "Ring" movies tonight and then I should be back on track.  But I'm only watching four more films before I shut down for the duration of the Comic-Con, you know how this goes, I have to be at the booth for 10 or 11 hours at a time, and it doesn't stop for four days, unless I can find someone to cover MY shift on Sunday. 

BUT if I can make it through Hell Week (NYCC will be followed by NewFest and then the New Yorker Festival at the theater), then there are just 14 horror films to go this month, then after 2 weeks comes a real break, no movies until just before Thanksgiving, and a week out of NY down in North Carolina in November.  So some form of vacation is on the horizon.

Brian Cox carries over again from "Quasi". 

THE PLOT: A journalist must investigate a mysterious videotape which seems to cause the death of anyone one week to the day after they view it. 

AFTER: There's a bunch of these "death is stalking you" movies that were made back in the day, like last year I watched "One Missed Call", which was quite ridiculous - where a person gets a cell phone call from their future self, and they learn about the exact moment they're going to die the next day.  There's nothing they can do to stop it, so this might make you wonder WHY they get the phone call announcing their impending doom, if the time and method of death can't be changed, the goal I guess is just to ensure they spend the last 24 hours of their life in abject terror and dread.  Then the presence picks a number saved in their phone and calls the next victim with a similar message pre-recorded in the future, and so on. 

Then there's the "Final Destination" series, which I have not been able to link to yet, and there's one called "It Follows", I haven't gotten to that one either.  But they all maybe trace back to "The Ring" from 2002, or perhaps to the 1998 Japanese horror film that "The Ring" was based on.  Here death is coming in seven days for anyone who watches a certain video-tape.  Two teen girls are sitting around, talking about the tape, and one pretends that she saw the film seven days ago - ha, ha, she was only kidding to scare her friend!  But then it turns out she wasn't kidding after all, she was spending time with her boyfriend a week ago and they watched "the tape".  They also discuss some B.S. about electro-magnetic waves, and how energy is always flowing around us and through our brains, as if that helps explain how watching a VHS tape can KILL YOU.  

So yeah, Katie's a goner, because she watched the tape a week ago and, umm, forgot to tell anyone about it until the last minute?  Sure enough, she gets a phone call from the mysterious force that tells her she's about to die, and then she gets scared TO DEATH by umm, something, it's a bit unclear.  But at the funeral, Katie's mother asks her sister Rachel to see if she can find out more about Katie's death, because Rachel is a journalist, and that's the ONLY profession that's allowed to ask questions about things.  Rachel agrees because her son Aidan was close to his cousin, Katie, and they spent time together a couple days every week.  

Oh, yeah, Aidan has some kind of supernatural ability, like he's been making drawings for the last week about a girl being buried, and also he's been drawing a house with a well and an attic room.  Probably not important, at least not yet.  Aidan's psychic drawings are kind of a nod to films like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Shining" - or maybe he's just a weird kid dealing with tragedy the only way he can, it's a little tough to say.  

Anyway, Rachel investigates the place where Katie (and all of her now-dead friends) was a week ago, which is the Shelter Mountain Inn, where I guess all the teens go to get laid?  The only entertainment available to the guests at the inn is one jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, one game of Parcheesi and a limited selection of VHS tapes, including the one that KILLS YOU seven days later.  So, umm, forgive me for asking, but why does anyone watch that tape?  I mean, teens today take drugs and eat Tide Pods, so they don't exactly have the best judgment, but how bad are the other movies at the inn when people guests want to watch the tape that kills them?  Are the only other movies "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Howard the Duck"?

So Rachel does the only thing she can think to do to learn more, she watches the videotape.  Yeah, umm, sure.  She's an adult, she heard that watching this tape can KILL YOU and then that's the first thing she does. Great. She gets the phone call with the ominous whispering voice that says "Seven days...." and somehow she does not regret her decision to watch the video. OK, sure, let's proceed. Maybe deep down she just doesn't believe the hype, really, because no movie could be so bad that it kills you, unless it's "Miss March" or "Norm of the North". But now there's a ticking clock, she's got 7 days to figure out who made the tape and how it's killing people, or she faces death herself. Right. 

Thankfully, her ex-husband is a video-tape analyst, because somehow that's a job back in 2002.  The film isn't even all that scary, it looks a bit like a Bunuel film from the early days of silent movies - there's a ladder, there's a lighthouse, a giant millipede, some things that are semi-spooky, but nothing outright scary.  So the film itself isn't scaring people to death, but some malevolent entity is tracking down the people who watched it and haunting them or subjecting them to psychological trauma, you know, because of energy and stuff, and I guess the power of filmmaking.  And it's not even that the film is SO BAD that people who watch it want to die, like with "Popeye" or "The Cat in the Hat", apparently it's something else. 

Rachel identifies a woman on the tape, a horse breeder named Anna Morgan, who committed suicide after a number of her horses drowned themselves.  She lived out on Moesko Island, and as Rachel is traveling there, a horse being transported on the same ferry breaks free and jumps off the boat.  Then when she meets Anna's widower husband, Richard, who tells her about their adopted daughter, Samara, he then commits suicide himself.  Man, people and horses were all just desperate to get out of this movie!  

Samara apparently also had psychic abilities, which she used to - umm, torture the horses?  She could psychically etch images into people's minds, whatever that means. There's a video-tape of her explaining her powers during a therapy session, and honestly the timeline doesn't really match up here, because Anna made a film that looked like a 1920's short film, and Samara was recorded on video-tape in the what, 1980's?  I can't tell when anything in the past took place, the timeline here is all screwed up somehow.  Very frustrating. 

NITPICK POINT: There's a drawing of a tree on the wall in the Morgan, home, and once Rachel and Noah peel off all the wallpaper, they see the tree, which Rachel immediately recognizes as the tree near the Shelter Mountain Inn.  REALLY?  There are hundreds of trees on the island, thousands of trees in the Seattle area, and Rachel immediately recognizes ONE tree in particular?  COME ON, the drawing was made thirty or forty years ago, that tree couldn't possibly look exactly the same, assuming it's still standing.  Trees do eventually fall over or die or get hit by lightning or destroyed in fires, they don't all last quite that long. 

Rachel and Noah then find that under the motel where Katie watched the tape, there's a well that leads down to - I don't know, hell or something?  Apparently Anna Morgan threw her evil adopted daughter Samara down the well and it took her seven days to die or something?  Thus the spirit of Samara kills people using the possessed VHS tape?  A bit of a stretch, to put things mildly.  

NITPICK POINT #2: There's a dead body in the video room, and Rachel's dealing with the trauma, but when she sees his girlfriend arriving and getting on the freight elevator, she doesn't even stop her, so a second person gets to experience the trauma of discovering the body?  Not cool - how about a simple, "Hey, stop, don't go up there!" - or is that too much to ask? 

Rachel somehow frees the soul of Samara from the well, and they give her body a proper burial, but that's not the end of the story, because young Aidan and his mother Rachel (who both watched the tape) figure out the loophole - Rachel copied the tape and showed it to someone else, and that freed her from the 7-day curse.  So all Aidan has to do is the same thing, copy the tape and show it to someone else, and then THEY will be cursed, not him.  Ah, so it's more like the "Star Wars Holiday Special", then.  That I definitely understand. 

Also starring Naomi Watts (last seen in "Infinite Storm"), Martin Henderson (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), David Dorfman (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jane Alexander (last seen in "Three Christs"), Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Rachael Bella (last seen in "The Crucible"), Daveigh Chase, Shannon Cochran (last seen in "Captive State"), Sandra Thigpen, Richard Lineback (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Sasha Barrese (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Tess Hall, Adam Brody (last seen in "American Fiction"), Alan Blumenfeld (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Pauley Perrette, Joe Chrest (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Ronald William Lawrence, Stephanie Erb (last seen in "Fearless"), Sara Rue (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), Joe Sabatino (last seen in "Vice" (2018)), Joanna Lin Black, Keith Campbell (last heard in "Rango", Chuck Hicks (last seen in "Everybody's All-American"), Michael Spound (last seen in "Must Love Dogs"), Gary Carlos Cervantes (last seen in "Stick"), Aixa Clemente (last seen in "Stand and Deliver"), Art Frankel (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Billy Lloyd, Guy Richardson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 blurry photographs