Product Description

Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her son Aidan (David Dorfman) have relocated to the quaint mountain town of Asheville, where Rachel has found a new job at the local Asheville Gazette, working alongside reporter Max Rourke (Simon Baker). The discovery of a local teenage homicide whilst scanning the electronic Asheville Police archives prompts Rachel to uncover the truth behind it. Before long, Rachel has linked the homicide to the mysterious video tape. Just when Rachel is within reach of uncovering the secret, she discovers that Aidan has been hospitalized - unconcious, perilously cold, and bruised. Rachel suspects this is the act of Samara Morgan, but Dr Emma Temple suspects otherwise. Having being blamed for child abuse and looking guilty as sin, Rachel returns to Seattle, to dig deeper into the past of the ghostly Samara. Will the secrets she uncovers solve problems, or will they end more lives?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35262 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-06-19
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Synopsis
In this horror sequel from Japanese master Hideo Nakata, the curse of the videotape returns. Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her son Aiden (David Dorfman) move from Seattle after their first terrible run-in with the tortured evil spirit Samara, relocating to Oregon. Attempting to make a fresh start, Rachel takes a job as a crime reporter at the local newspaper, instantly establishing a pluckily competitive friendship with colleague Max Rourke (Simon Baker). But when it turns out Samara (Kelly Stables) has followed their trail, taking out innocent teens along the way with her old videotape tricks, Rachel dives right back into the mystery. But Samara gets to her son Aiden first. And as a budding photographer in his own right, with a nifty digital camera that he takes everywhere, Aiden quickly finds his own way to harness the relentless ghost. This time, along with the familiar video imagery and spooky clues from the first film, there is a lot of flooding going on. Water pours from television sets, doorways, and especially bathtubs. In addition, there are special effects involving some undead deer who, like Samara, seem to want respite for their wrongful deaths. Sissy Spacek makes a cameo as a religious mental patient in a creepy institution. But it is Watts who steals the show as the fearless uber-mom who digs through the cobwebbed basement of a haunted house, plunges to the bottom of a slimy well, and dances with death in an attempt to stop the perpetual cycle.

Customer Reviews

Samara has really lost her touch
I loved the first Ring film so much that I couldn't wait to see this but apart from one moment of sharp intakes of breath and grabbing of friends' arms at the beginning (where Rachel thinks she sees Samara again) it wasn't even mildly scary. In fact that moment was more scary because I was anticipating it to be rather that actually being scary. It rumbles along with no real sense of direction and the plot gets progressively more ridiculous. This is a blatant cash in on the success of the first film but they would have been better leaving well alone. Naomi Watts is in annoyingly blonde and pathetic form when she crashes into a herd of killer deer and then decides to just sit there in the middle of the road and stare at them until, surprise, surprise, they attack. Samara is distictly unscary and the reason for this is that this time around the screenwriters have tried to humanise her a bit more and portray her not as a creepy little freak with unnaturally long hair but as a vulnerable little girl who just wants a Mum, how is that meant to be scary? I also found that towards the end I was losing the plot and it didn't make any sense but that could just have been because I had fallen asleep. Absolute rubbish.

The Ring Two
This film was absolute garbage. I thought the first one (The Ring) was quite unusual, not your run of the mill horror, and I thought it was really good. Not so much scary, but really, really creepy. So I was keen to watch the sequel - what a disappointment. The storyline & acting was weak, weak, weak. If there was an option to rate 0, I wouldn't give it any stars at all.

Far more impressive than it may appear on first viewing
Producing a successful sequel to such a truly new and unusual (not to mention highly successful) film as The Ring is a daunting task. You can't just tell the same story over again, yet any moves in a new direction are apt to be decried by loyal fans of the original. I usually try to review a film immediately after watching it, but in the case of The Ring Two, I have allowed several days to go by - and thankfully so because my appreciation for this film has grown over that time. Certainly, this film is not as good as the original - how could it be? After all, we've already seen Samara in all of her glory, and we've even spent some time in the well. The shock value of The Ring Two just can't compare with that of the original. Believability also rears its ugly head here, as Samara's unreal powers have grown and, in a real sense, taken flight in the sequel. This is no longer about people watching the tape and dying seven days later; remember, Rachel freed Samara from the well at the end of the first movie. She's more dangerous than ever now, and her desires have changed - she wants more than vengeance now.

I think it was quite a coup to get Hideo Nakata, the director of Ringu and Ringu 2, to direct here, but I think the vision he brings to this film also explains part of the disconnect we've seen with some fans of The Ring. The Japanese approach to horror is quite different from our own. American audiences are used to being shown things, oftentimes explicitly, while Japanese horror is much more subtle, symbolic, and spiritual. It is this cultural divide, I believe, that leads some Ring fans to label this film a poor sequel. Adapting Japanese horror for an American audience is quite a challenge - just look at The Grudge, a film that even I felt just didn't work. In The Ring, all of the symbolic clues, especially those in the videotape, basically led to something - namely, Samara's story and the location of her body. The Ring Two does not lay out such a clear pathway for the hero or the viewer; the symbology is much deeper and abstract this time around. It's not that this causes confusion on the part of the viewer; it's just that much of the story plays out on a level that many viewers are not culturally suited to experience. That's why I would recommend watching all of the bonus features on this DVD - they certainly helped hone my appreciation for what I had just seen.

As for the story, you have Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) and her son Aidan (David Dorman) leaving Seattle and moving to Astoria, Oregon shortly after the events of the first movie played out (it's supposedly six months later, but Hideo Nakata says two years in the production notes). Rachel is still suffering somewhat from a sense of guilt (over passing the tape on to other innocents in order to save her son), but she and Aidan are both trying to start their lives anew and forget about Samara. That's all well and good, but Samara has not forgotten about them. That's obvious after a local youth dies a horrible death under mysterious circumstances - and Rachel is quickly left with no doubt whatsoever that Samara has found them. We quickly move beyond the cursed videotape, however, as Samara works to exploit her unique connection to Aidan. This time around, Rachel cannot save her son through anything approaching conventional means, nor can she rely on the help of anyone else, now including her son. Increasingly desperate, she decides to trace Samara's history before her adoption by the Morgans, eventually finding and speaking to the girl's actual birth mother (Sissy Spacek in quite a memorable cameo). It looks like all the drama is leading up to a fairly predictable ending - but just remember that a film is never over until it's over.

Naomi Watts basically carries this movie on her back, as she is the filter through which we view everything that happens. Up until now, I never really appreciated Watts as an actress, but I do now. David Dorman is another story for me, though. While he is able to deliver some very effective scenes, at times I can't help but think that he attended the Hayden Christensen school of acting. Sure, he's a little creepy, but now it's in a televangelistic way - to me, he looks like a combination of Jim Bakker and a young Macaulay Culkin. I love Samara, though; thankfully, Nakata chose not to go the CGI route with her at all (even still, she's not half as creepy as her original Japanese counterpart), which would have made a mockery of the whole creep factor. CGI is used, unfortunately, on the deer that dominate one memorable scene. I can understand how real deer could not be used, but this particular scene, after starting out very effectively indeed, is ultimately ruined by the ridiculous obviousness of the CGI animation.

Unlike The Ring, The Ring Two is packed with special features (although we still don't get a commentary, unfortunately). Easily the best of the bunch is a short film called Rings, which is sort of a prequel to The Rings Two. I really liked the idea played with over these 15-20 minutes - that of an underground network of teens who have watched the videotape, recorded their increasingly disturbing experiences for as long as they could stand it, and then passed it on to a fellow newbie before their seven days were up. Along with this impressive short film, you get a series of excellent making-of featurettes featuring a surprisingly lengthy set of production notes, information on the cast and crew, and some nineteen minutes of deleted scenes. Altogether, it's an impressive package for a truly excellent and, to some degree, misunderstood motion picture.