For anyone convinced the unending desire to run any notable property into the ground need look no further than The Ring Two, which released in March of 2005 and served as the sequel to the remake of a literary adaptation, one that had already launched a franchise of its own over in Japan.
To hammer home the lack of originality even further, Ringu director Hideo Nakata was drafted in to replace Gore Verbinski behind the camera, meaning that he was helming the sequel to a movie he’d made in another continent almost a decade previously, which got a second installment of its own… that he also directed.
The Ring Two did a decent turn at the box office after recouping its $50 million production costs three times over, but respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of just 20 and 33 percent from critics and audiences neatly sum up the fact that it didn’t really need to exist for any other reason than wringing some extra cash out of paying customers.
The plot is almost exactly the same, the jump scares are predictable, and the atmosphere is virtually non-existent, bar a reliably solid Hans Zimmer score. Horror is guaranteed to perform on streaming whatever the weather, though, a recurring theme The Ring Two is more than happy to oblige.
Per FlixPatrol, the tepid supernatural chiller is right on the cusp of breaking into HBO Max’s global Top 10, and the irony of a VHS-driven tale hitting big on-demand shouldn’t be lost on anyone.
