Flaming oaks out bedroom windows

There are people whose job it is to travel to plane crashes and pick through the debris. With the heaps of steel and aluminum they find, amidst the ruined humanity--the indescribable chaos--they must somehow create order. Their job is to understand the story of what went wrong, they must find answers. After watching the Ring 2, I feel a kinship with these people. More than mere empathy, an understanding of the helplessness of bearing witness to such a tragedy, I have a desire to ensure that such a thing will never happen again.

A Conspiracy of Blandness

Ahead I have compiled conclusive evidence that The Ring 2 is nothing short of a concerted effort to drain all that was good and original in a movie concept and replace it with insipid nonsense and slasher cliché--and a chase scene [for God's sake].

The opening scene is ripped from every horror movie you've seen since Halloween. Two teens, a boy and a girl, about to do what boys and girls do. But before we fondle each other, I got this tape I want you to see . . .

Mind-numbing and portentous.

Ten minutes in they take the tape away. Samara doesn't need it after all. Perhaps she was just pretending. The you'll-be-dead-in-seven-days motif is gone as well. She can kill you right away. That must be liberating.

At first, though, she plays by the original rules to track Rachel Keller down [in Astoria, which hasn't seen this much violence since One-Eyed Willy or John Kimball], killing people via video tape, making her way down the coastline. But once she finds Rachel, whom she has selected to be her new mommy, all rules go out the window. She's free to stalk people anywhere, though generally only when there aren't a lot of witnesses around. She can now also possess their bodies. She does all this to get Naomi Watts to like her. That part I understand.

"She wants to live. For real this time."

It's a quality of life issue for Samara. I see. Her mom was crazy and she drove her foster parents that way. Now she just wants a normal [after]life. But you have to ask yourself, Samara--sweetie--with everyone around you going crazy, do you think that maybe you're the reason?

Another thing Ring 2 ruins about the mystery of Samara, is that the child's soul wasn't twisted and enraged by her murder, she was a demon to begin with. Demon babies are old hat, but the assertion that evil in life creates evil in death is wonderfully fresh, possessed of an Eastern sensibility that American horror is mostly unused to.

But maybe Samara doesn't get that she's a crazy murderous demon. Ignorance of self has propelled lots of great movies, I could get behind that.

The newfound stupidity of Rachel Keller, though, is inexplicable. She was so smart in The Ring. Decisive too. She figured out Samara's puzzle, all the way to the end she nailed it. Then, confronted with a terrible choice, an impossible choice--one's child or one's lover--she acted with strength and resolve. Exactly half of the original brilliance of The Ring was its strong characters and difficult moral dilemmas. When it's you deciding who lives and who dies, everything is more terrifying.

Now, after seeing Samara again, and after it's obvious that she's got eyes on Rachel's son, Aiden, Rachel continues to leave him in big houses, alone in dark rooms. Then, each time [5 by my count] she comes in to find the boy soaked with sweat yet freezing cold to the touch, she seems surprised. The wall paper in Aiden's just burned in the shape of a flaming oak tree . . . that couldn't happen twice.

The state eventually comes in and actually takes Aiden into their custody, accusing Rachel of abuse. This is meant to be a tragic irony--it's obviously Samara doing the abusing--but you can only leave a kid alone in so many bathtubs with so many demon babies before you're guilty of at least neglect.

Earlier, as her Volkswagen is being pummeled by twenty-odd rampaging whitetail deer [murderous deer being as close to the first movie's suicidal horses as you can get in Astoria, Oregon], and Aiden tells her to floor it, rather than speeding away, Rachel stops to marvel that the boy knows just what to do in the situation. The Rachel I know would've hit it, and taken out as many death-deer as possible.

The Ring 2 is possessed of no coherent logical structure, and as a result, makes no sense. Way more troublesome than not making sense, though, this structure was what made the original film scary in the first place. Without it, Ring 2 fumbles even basic chills.

The Hannibal Correlate

We've seen this kind of thing before. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is fantastically scary. He's a brilliant psychotic, capable of using the power of suggestion to kill. People literally swallow their tongues in fright when he's around. He exudes preternatural evil. The scariest thing about Lecter, though, is that he sows his violence without ever leaving his cell. He's in an ultra-maximum security lockdown and he still manages to kill. This is the power the original Ring wielded, Samara could kill--was very successful at killing--despite confinement [in a VHS tape]. Despite logical structures in place to protect us, we can still die. So we fear, but this internal logic also imbues the audience with a false sense of control. If you know the rules, you stay alive. Of course, you never know all the rules. That sense of unpredictability, in the end, is what creates real terror.

The Ring 2 stumbles the same way Hannibal [sequel to Silence of the Lambs] did. It takes away the internal logic that kept Samara [and Hannibal] seemingly distant. Once those constructs are absent, naturally, evil goes on a rampage. All of a sudden, and perhaps counter-intuitively, with the maniac on the loose, we know exactly who will die: anyone who gets in his or her way. There's no unpredictability to knowing that everyone's going to get it. At that point, you have nothing to work with but the promise of gruesome murders and a reliance on wacky camera angles and madmen in closets to sustain any level of tension.

The perception of threat is an extension of the unknown. Uncertainty is menace, and that is always scarier than some veiny, tensed corpse with its face all screwed-up i