twO

Music: You Cannot Rape The Willing by Emanuel

The Ring was a great movie, I have a lot of good times associated with that movie. I was creeped out by it the first time I saw it. Lindsay went with me to see it twice; the first time she didn't pay any attention because kids were throwing candy at her, the second time she was properly freaked out. James was absolutely petrified by it and made Lindsay keep the headlights on the house until he was in the door. He later would become obsessed by it and go frame-by-frame through the DVD and send me image after image of the horrific water-ruined corpses, along with video compilations of all the disturbing parts edited together and sound files of Rachael's bone-chilling scream. And just this week Erin watched it for the first time and I called her cell immediately after it was over and rasped "Seven daaaays" and she nearly had a heart attack.

The movie was great, plain and simple. It set up simple rules, had a defined set of imagery and symbols, and stuck to it. It came up with increasingly creative ways to creep you out as the movie progressed, and everything had a cohesive feel to it. There were dozens of connections you could make without the movie having to explicitly explain it. It was a rich, full universe and you could easily suspend your belief and enjoy it. And the ending, god the ending was amazing. Crappy, false ending, and then everything was turned upside down in a matter of seconds and it was an all-out rush to the end.

The Ring 2 (or tw0, whatever it is really called, there was no title sequence) was a huge disappointment. Total crap. The opening scene was very promising, a creative twist on the way the first one ended, and a logical progression as well. Then it just went totally downhill. What follows was a bastardization of all the rules of the first film. Random shit for cheap thrills, bad-quality CGI, and a general mess of scenes. A few moments here and there were interesting, but it followed no logic at all and there was no way to predict how things would end up because there was no rhyme or reason to any of it. No cool connections, no satisfying ending, no nothing. Oh well. At least the sappy, unrealistic ending didn't leave much room for a Ring 3, but then again logic didn't stop them from many of the twists in this movie...

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