Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I think this is the first reaction I’ve seen so far to the upcoming RING 2, and it seems fairly positive. With the news hitting today that Sony’s making a GRUDGE sequel, it sounds like Japanese horror fever has officially hit overdrive here in the States, which makes me wonder... if all of their directors are coming here to make horror films now, who’s going to be making the films we’re remaking in five years?
Dear Lord of Geeks,
Not sure if someone else already chimed in on this one or not, but I managed to sneak into one of the local theater here in San Diego, and finagle a ticket to The Ring 2. If the review is a little odd, well I have had some cocktails after the movie and everyone can blame the booze.
This was a rough working cut of the film that we got to see, and they prefaced that many of the effects were not done yet, and that there were other issues such as sound, much etc, that had not quiet gotten to the polishing stage yet, they said that we were some of the first people to get a look at the film, and I have to say security was pretty tight with lots of studio folks hanging around, and the obligatory security folks with night vision goggles on etc. The odd thing was there were really searching for digital cameras and cameras phones, and when I took our my PDA Treo 600 phone and showed it to them, I guess it was so nerdy looking they just glossed over the fact that there is a camera in the back of the thing and passed me right on through.
All in all I think the movie was Pretty Good, it basically picks up after a year or so from the last film. We now find Naomi Watts character Rachel Keller moving with her son Aidan (David Dorfman) going to Astoria to start a new life as a newspaper editor at a local paper, but as you can guess, the little girl on the tape is back for a little revenge.
While I won’t go into a play by play of the movie so as not to ruin it for everyone, I can say that if you dug The Ring, there is a good chance your going to like this one for pure creep out factor. Although not as unnerving as the first one since this is more of the same type of creep style but this one still has many surprises and continues the story of Samara.
If you remember when Rachel and Aidan made that last copy of the tape in the previous movie that over time it has now propagated from person to person, each copying it and passing a new copy along, all along she is in search of them both. It becomes evident that the spirit of Samara is trying to find them both, and rather than seek revenge she wants to live again through the boy via everyone’s favorite horror plot tool - Possession.
Some memorable scenes that come to mind are when their car gets attacked by a large group of deer. Sounds kinda lame I know, but just seeing that many deer behaving that way to the them semi-possessed Aidan was pretty creepy.
There was also the scene where Aidan is sitting in the bathtub and all of the water in the tub/room is flowing upwards and away from him (evidently Samara doesn’t like water, go figure), the CG here is really fucking nice.
Then what has to be the fucking most creepy thing I have seen in a long time with Samera climbing up through the well chasing Rachel to the top. The way she moves is that weird ass herky jerky style of movement, but also add in some creepy ass crab-like motions that really freaked people out, my section of the theater at this point was throwing their popcorn around like little girls.
I got the impression that the director might have wanted to use more of the disturbing imagery in this one and just got clamed down on by the machine of Hollywood. However, there were some aspects that harkened back to the original that really got the hair on my arm sticking up.
Over all I would give it a B+ / A- and strongly recommend NOT to take any drugs before going in to see this flick.
If you use this you can call me “Our Man in Amsterdam”.
I know I remember that scene with Samara chasing a character up the walls of the well from one of the earlier sequels, but it sounds like for the most part, they’ve left behind the stuff we’ve already seen and are creating their own storyline now. Interesting... and we only have to wait until mid-March to get a look at it.
"Moriarty" out.
