REVIEWED - THE RING 2Ten years after Kevin Williamson's script for Scream launched a vogue for tediously self-conscious horror, the genre finally seems to have moved on to fresh obsessions.
On balance, Japanese masters such as Hideo Nakata and Takashi Shimizu, the sources of this little renaissance, have had a beneficial effect on American shock cinema. Blissfully free of jokes about which sexual act will elicit what class of execution, the new breed of film - think The Grudge and The Ring - sees atavistic fears about ancient evils being played out amid sombre grey modernity.
The flicks have been eerie, fun and profitable, but too often that delightful Japanese narrative obliqueness has, somewhere in the translation, been replaced with sheer, numbing incoherence. Never more so than here.
Nakata's curiously housebound The Ring Two is, of course, a sequel to the successful American version of his own Ringu. You might also describe it as a very unfaithful remake of the same director's Ringu 2. Either way it makes no sense whatsoever.
Naomi Watts, the journalist whose life fell apart when a bewitched videotape introduced spectres to her living room, has retired to a quiet town in Oregon with her young son. Soon it is all happening again. Then it isn't. Nakata gets a few references to the video (video? What's that, granddad?) out of the way in the first 20 minutes and then moves on to an investigation of the complex and frankly rather boring background to the original haunting.
Since the influence of Japanese horror set in, I have found myself, twice a month or so, complaining about a film whose frequent chilling moments do not fit together in any rational fashion. Watching such a movie, one genuinely begins to wonder whether the projectionist has the reels in the right order. Audiences are sure to jump at the various surprising lunges in The Ring Two and to be rendered uncomfortable by the wonderfully nasty things Nakata does with water.
Everybody will, even if the results are largely comic, enjoy the killer deer which surround the car where Ms Watts - already this century's Fay Wray, even before the release of Peter Jackson's King Kong - clears her lungs with singular gusto. But I defy anybody to tell me what the film is about.
Donald Clarke
