The Ring Two - a recap

Before watching The Ring Two as part of my quest to watch every movie Simon Baker has starred in  I decided to (logically) watch The Ring. I've seen both movies ages ago but though I remember being scared pantless while watching The Ring I couldn't remember anything about the sequel (after watching it again, I realize why). Now I’m not going to write a recap of The Ring because, well, then I’ll be dead in 7 days and we can’t have that now can we. So onward and away with this wondrous recap of The Ring Two. 

(If you're reading this, please note that I'm going to disregard the fact that you may or may not have seen The Ring.) 

As the movie starts we see that Rachel (Naomi Watts) and Aidan (nobody cares) have moved from the city to a small town in an effort to ‘leave everything behind and move on’. Of course the very gesture assures us that there will be no moving on. Oh wait, that’s not how the movie starts. The movie starts by showing us a couple of high-school kids who have apparently just got together. The girl seems a bit wary of the boy’s advances because apparently he has not noticed her throughout high school and now has suddenly shown an interest in her. Having shown us these high schoolers, and gotten them talking, the movie then decides to order a pizza and go sit in the comfy chair and not really go anywhere much for a while. Anyways, it turns out that the boy’s motive for getting hitched was purely to avoid a horrifying death at the hands of the VHS of Doom. We learned in the earlier movie that the only way to avoid a watery and hairy death was to make a copy of the tape and make sure someone else watches it. So being an intended victim and knowing the way out (and knowing, we know, is half the battle) he takes his brand new girlfriend over to his parent’s place, sits her down in front of the TV and tells her to watch this tape. Seriously, that’s his plan. And he expects her to go along with it. His “plan” (which was no plan to begin with) is foiled for two reasons (a) he absurdly waits till two minutes before the deadline to put the plan into effect (b) he picks someone who clearly does not consider a 2-minute horror clip as an acceptable form of foreplay. After taking approximately 15 hours to show us this prologue, the movie decides to finally move forward.

Rachel it turns out has procured a position at the local newspaper. The newspaper is being run by Max (Simon Baker) who has left New York (which he loves) to come back home and take charge of the family business. I mean, I assume it’s the family business. A lot of assumptions went into the writing of this recap simply because I couldn't be bothered to verify anything. Max walks into Rachel’s office where a huge deal is made about how she keeps the door closed. If this was a romantic comedy then by the end of the movie Rachel would have turned into a warm and loving person who keeps the door to her office open. But this is not and the whole thing is possibly just a metaphor for how she has secrets but we don’t care because did I mention that Max is in the room now? He’s a bit upset at how she’s re-written an editorial that she was merely supposed to copy-edit.Though how he can expect anyone to gather enough wits about them to proof read documents when the fluorescent light is glinting off his curls is beyond me. Rachel it appears is made of sterner stuff than I am.

I'll edit your copy Max, I'l edit it till you walked bow-legged

The same evening, the news story about the dead teenager (see the plan that failed above) breaks and what seems to be the whole newspaper gathers at the crime scene. Rachel gains entry to the coroner’s van where she is horrified to discover that the boy has died with the mark of the ring monster on him (grayish skin, gaping mouth, distorted face).  She breaks into the dead boy’s house, retrieves a VHS from the tape deck, immediately comes to the conclusion that it’s the VHS of Doom and burns it. Apparently any tape sans label is clearly one of THOSE tapes. That night Aidan has a nightmare about the ring monster (a.k.a. evil Samara). But when Rachel questions him he shrugs it off. (May I say here that Aiden who was quite likeable in the first movie is decidedly annoying in the second?) Right about now the movie realizes that it hasn’t been acting very ominously so it decides to throw in a spot of foreshadowing and makes Rachel tell Aiden that “all you have to do is call my name and I’ll follow your voice." adding “even if I have to come right down into that nightmare with you”. Oh we can’t possibly imagine why this could be important later on, wink wink, nudge nudge.

The next day Rachel and Aiden are at a flea market and they bump into Max. Or, rather, Rachel bumps into Max while Aiden wanders off taking photographs of random things. 

and then, and then, fzzzzt pffftbbl fink

It gets a bit hazy at this point because Max’s pecs are straining at his shirt but when I regain consciousness Aiden is in a bathroom where all the toilets are flushing as a harbinger of the ring monster. Sure enough, evil Samara appears and Aiden freezes to the spot, repeatedly takes photographs of her and that’s where a distraught Rachel finds him, still clicking away seemingly at nothing. Evidently the whole ‘call my name and I’ll follow your voice’ is not a hereditary thing because throughout the movie Aiden pointedly ignores Rachel while she runs around calling his name.

They go home, and stuff happens and more stuff happens and none of it is either interesting or scary. They get attacked by stags (stags? deer with antlers?) on the way home from the flea market, Aiden has another nightmare of sorts and his body temperature drops, you know, stuff like that. All this convinces Rachel that she needs to get out of there so they make a run for it, er, inexplicably down to her office at the newspaper. Everyone is still at work though it’s clearly quite late in the night. No one seems intrigued by Rachel hustling a blanket-wrapped Aiden into her office. Max, who has heard about Rachel's car being the victim of a stag party, offers to help and Rachel allows him to. Help in this instance appears to consist of going over to his place and running a hot bath for Aiden because hospitals are for pussies I guess. “ Shouldn't he be at a hospital” Max asks, aptly voicing our precise thoughts. “No, he’ll be fine” says Rachel wanting to move the plot along. “I’ll go home, get some things, then we’ll leave here” she says to Aiden, mere moments after he’d told her that “she can hear us, she hears everything” (“she” being evil Samara). And she conveniently disregards the fact that geographical displacement is not a deterrent for this creature.  Rachel seems to also continuously forgets the association between water and the ring monster and forces Aiden into the bathtub against his will. 

just to prove that I didn't google only screencaps of Simon Baker

Then she asks Max to look after him while she runs over to their place to get some clothes and stuff, you know, as mothers are wont to do - leaving their kid who’s clearly scared shitless with a stranger and running off on unnecessary errands. A lot of water related drama which I’m too bored to relate ensues, and finally FINALLY Max puts his foot down and makes Rachel take Aiden to the hospital.

Obviously the hospital staff jump to the conclusion that Rachel has been abusing and/or neglecting her son what with the bruises and the hypothermia and the coma. Rachel of course does her part in reinforcing their suppositions by escaping from an interview with a psychiatrist (seriously, she jumps out a window) and going off to investigate er, stuff. Before she runs off there is a scene where she tries to explain to Max what’s going on. But she mistakenly assumes that he has seen The Ring and knows what she’s talking about. She ends up by showing him Aiden’s camera where all the photographs show evil Simara standing behind Aiden. After she leaves, we see Max walking towards Aiden’s room purposefully but I think that's just a scene the editor left in and hoped no one would notice because, well, for the same reason this sentence has no proper ending.

Rachel makes her way to the Morgans’ (the couple from the previous movie who adopted Samara a.k.a. the ring monster before she became the ring monster) house - which seems to have magically moved from the island (where it stood in the first movie) to the mainland and there she discovers a clue to the identity of ring monster’s birth mother. She follows the clue to a nunnery where she leans that Simara’s mother tried to kill her baby and was then institutionalized. Rachel goes forth to the institution (incidentally, all these places seem to be a half hour’s drive away from each other) where she meets Evelyn – mother monster - and learns that she tried to kill her baby to - dun-dun-dunnnnn SAVE it. (Gosh, will this movie never end?)

Aiden meanwhile wakes up, induces the psychiatrist trying to interview him to kill herself and walks home. The movie decides to show us what we figure out even before the damn thing started – that evil Samara has inhabited Aiden’s body during the water works at Max’s house. Max then comes around to Rachel’s place, because the script said so. He attempts to take a photograph of Aiden and Aiden says no, he will promise to tell Max what’s wrong if he promises not to take the picture. Max agrees because it's not like he could have taken the photograph while Aiden was in a coma at the hospital or anything. 

Rachel returns, finds her monster child and a Max who has ceased to be. Determined to save her child she drugs him and then drowns him. If she feels any trepidation towards killing her child to save him (or taking life lessons from an institutionalized crazy person) it doesn’t take up more than two seconds of screen time. She does manage to exorcise evil Samara from Aiden’s body and to revive a waterlogged Aiden without resorting to CPR. And they live happily ever after, till two minues later, where they walk over to the living room and there is evil Samara doing her thang and emerging from the TV hands outstretched. Rachel painstakingly vanquishes her to her watery grave – in one fell swoop negating everything that took place in the previous movie – and returns to Aiden, proving that he only has to call her and she will come to him (unlike him, who never comes when called).