As anyone who watched the first “Ring” knows, the trick to lifting the curse from yourself is to burden someone else with it.



Oh, if only herpes was that simple.



It’s a year or two later and Rachel (Naomi Watts) has taken her creepy dead eyed son Aidan (David Dorfman) to a small town to escape the evil that beset them in Seattle. That’s like the kids from “Friday the 13th” just switching cottages to avoid the guy with the chainsaw. Evil has a car and GPS. You aren’t getting off that easily.



The film opens as a teenage boy gives his girlfriend a tape and tells her to watch it because it’s “really scary.” Nice guy eh? Well, at least it adds a whole new meaning to the term “Messy break up”. At any rate the teenage boy is a bit nervous because (as usual) he’s left it to the last moment and now he has to convince his girlfriend to watch the tape in the next 2 minutes or he’s toast. I fully admit that I left a few book reports until the lunch period before English class when I was 17 but this is a bit ridiculous. He had an entire week to curse someone else and this idiot waits until he’s getting the 2 minute warning?! Call me proactive but about 5 seconds after my buddy cursed me I’d be going over to the VCR display at Futureshop and cursing the people in aisle number 5.



When word of the teenager’s death (oh, sorry…. am I giving too much away here?) reaches the tiny newspaper where Rachel now works it all starts to sound a bit familiar and so she decides to go and look at the body. Anyone killed by the curse looks a bit… um…shall we say “distinctive” from your regular run of the mill heart attack victim, so when Rachel pops into the unattended ambulance to unzip the body bag her worst fears are confirmed.



My worst fear is that when I die the ambulance attendants will be off having a smoke and leaving my body unattended while a large burly man in a leather kilt lingers nearby but I digress.



Sensing the opportunity to put and end to the curse, Rachel takes the videotape and sets it on fire which leads us to the next logical question. If someone has come back from the dead and can kill people by imbuing her evil spirit onto a videotape do you think that there might be a remote possibility that it won’t be that easy? Does she think that Samara is playing hearts on her computer and then will get up to check her portal of evil and say “Son of a bitch… someone has melted the door out of here”? If a rat can chew through concrete the devil child is going to find a way back.



And that of course is where we start borrowing heavily from just about every other horror movie out there.



Samara has decided that since her abstract tape of evil is now a puddle of molten goo the best way to get revenge is to come out of the TV and possess the body of Aidan.



I have to check my abacus of plagiarism on this one. Is that ripping off the Exorcist or Poltergeist? Hang on, it gets better. Since Samara doesn’t sleep you can only be safe in your dreams. Does reversing the plot of “Nightmare on Elm Street” count as not stealing? That’s like a guy going out and killing nothing but hockey goalies on Saturday the 14th.



The Ring 2 starts relying heavily on what I like to call the “33.3% Rule” of horror. At least 1/3 of of the time that you look into a reflective surface or close the medicine cabinet door the audience will see the evil spirit standing behind you. Likewise, anytime that you are engrossed in reading something or examining an object there must be at least a swelling of music to make us THINK that Samara is hiding over there behind the couch but she won’t really be (except 1/3 of the time when she will actually be over there).



The worst example of stealing from a movie is at the end when Rachel (more or less) screams out the same line that Ripley gave us in “Aliens 2.”



“I’m not your mother bitch.”



If I had never been to the movies in my life it might have been scary, but it’s to horror movies what a pie in the face is to comedy.



In short, this movie sucks. Avoid at all costs.