"Ring" redux

Noel Vera

When Hideo Nakata's "Ringu" (Ring, 1998) was released by Asmik Ace
Entertainment, the sequel was released simultaneously. No, not "Ring
2" but "Rasen" (Spiral), written and directed by Iida Jouji;
apparently the producers believed enough in Koji Suzuki's popular
horror novels that they thought if the first one clicked people would
flock to the second. "Ringu" was a huge hit, but "Rasen" was not;
apparently people preferred Nakata's more accessible horror-thrill
techniques to Jouji's minimalist style. Asmik Ace Entertainment
(wonderful name--sounds like a comic-book and bubble-gum-card company
at the same time) quickly threw together the cast and crew of "Ringu"
again, and made "Ring 2."

It begins right after "Ringu" ends, so people curious to see this
film should have already seen the first one. Sadako's corpse is
autopsied, and the doctors are astonished to learn that she has been
dead only one or two years...meaning she has been living down in the
well, alive and apparently conscious, for a good thirty years.
Meanwhile, Mai Takano (Miki Nakatani) wants to find out why her
boyfriend, Professor Ryuji Takayama (Hiroyuki Sanada), died so
horribly. Takano ends up looking for Takayama's former wife, Reiko
Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), the TV reporter who in a way started
this whole mess, and her son Yoichi (Rikiya Otaka), who has
apparently inherited his father's psychic powers and Sadako's undying
anger...

It's all so very complicated, and probably only someone thoroughly
terrified by "Ringu" would want to go and sit through this sequel--
as, apparently, many Japanese were (the sequel did brisk business).
The patient (or gullible, if you like) viewer is rewarded with a
clever transposition of roles, as bit players in "Ringu"--Asakawa's
assistant Okazaki (Yuuri Yanagi), and Takano, to name a few--are
given larger or leading roles here (presumably because the previous
protagonists have either died or gone missing).

Sadako's fatal power is also revealed to be a manifestation of the
subconscious mind, transferable and controllable as a kind of psychic
energy, which is awful or entertaining stuff, depending on how you
see it. It explains away the horror at the center of "Ringu" with a
series of lectures filled with scientific mumbo-jumbo, complete with
laboratory experiments involving Olympic-sized swimming pools and
metal chairs bristling with electrodes...

I have a fondness for this kind of mumbo-jumbo, myself. The bristly
chairs and large pools (to "absorb excess energy," what else for?)
are just the kind of silliness you find in cheesy (Japanese or not)
horror films, and Nakata seems to be paying tribute to them when he
parades them onscreen.

But what the Japanese came for, and what Manila audiences presumably
will come for too, is Nakata's trademark horror setpieces: tense,
irrational, eminently stylish. He unfortunately doesn't have as
elegant a structure to work with--no seven-day deadlines to race
against, here--and you miss the elegance: you miss knowing what's
going to happen, and why, and in the last scene having that knowledge
thrown in your face as Nakata did in "Ringu." What he and writer
Hiroshi Takahashi have created is more of a "one-piled-atop-another"
horror show when they should have come up with something as good as
what they did in "Ringu." In Suzuki's novel, the victims die of
anxiety accompanied by a tightening of the chest and visions of
themselves horribly aged; in the film, Nakata and Takahashi (with,
reportedly, input by cutting-edge filmmaker Kurosawa Kyoshi ("Kyua"
(The Cure), "Kairo" (Pulse)) tie Sadako's revenge to the
proliferation of electronic media--to the VCRs and TV sets so
omnipresent in Japanese lives. Anything that suggests they could be
in any way life-threatening would be sure to freak Japanese audiences-
-and, apparently, us--out...

There are plenty of memorable moments in "Ring 2," many of them
trading heavily on electronic media and on Nakata's gift for evoking
the irrational. Okazaki watching a recording of one of Sadako's
victims, and wondering why the tape (apparently) can't go beyond the
sight of her fear-stricken face; Takano, like Asakawa before her,
coming to Sadako's home, and watching in terror as a portion of the
deadly tape is played right before her, live...

It's all terribly complicated, but when Nakata sets aside the
unwieldy plot and simply plays with the hairs at the back of our
necks--with those leftover (though hardly obsolete) warning signals
we inherited from our animal ancestors--he never fails to make them
slowly stand, one by inexorable one. I can't call Nakata a great
horror artist (unlike, say, Kurosawa Kyoshi), and "Ring 2" is hardly
the definitive example of a horror sequel that outdoes the original
(that honor goes to, I think, John Boorman's insanely
lyrical "Exorcist 2: The Heretic"). But Nakata is likely one of the
better ones practicing the art, and "Ring 2" has its own store of
genuine chills, ready and available for the willing viewer...

(Originally printed in Businessworld 3.7.03)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)