THE RING TWO

Here’s the thing about me, when I’m not writing myself into the scripts of often long-forgotten horror movies I dabble in a bit of stand-up comedy. I used to do a bit years ago with the premise “What if you made The Ring now?” And then I’d do a fun little act out of me receiving the cursed VHS tape and having no way to play it. It’s the sort of gag about a film from 2002 that was really pushing for relevancy in 2015. I tried a few years back to do it again, like ‘Does this idea work?’ and I tell you what, I didn’t think that the human face could express a look that says “The movie you are talking about is very old now and far away in our memories” but I was proven wrong on that day.

So here I am again, in the year 2021 begging you to think back to The Ringfranchise once more. The American remake of The Ring is a scary movie filled with a bunch of iconic images and surrounded by a plot that you have almost certainly forgotten by this point. Naomi Watts finds this cursed video that if you watch it you die within a week, unless you produce a copy of the video. But the movie is about unravelling the mystery behind the weird images in the video.

The Ring Two decides that we want even more backstory about Samara, the creepy girl who climbs out of the TV screens, so the movie has Naomi Watts as Rachel Keller run around discovering even more plot we couldn’t possibly care about. There are also a huge number of CGI deer in this movie. Give us the backstory of those deer. Let Naomi Watts ride one of the deer. Why not? That’s hardly any dumber than the rest of the movie.

The American iteration of The Ring franchise grinds to a halt after this one. They tried rebooting it with Rings fifteen years later, when they figured out the same thing I learnt trying to talk about The Ring on stage – people have forgotten about this movie and you can’t convince them to care, no matter how effective your “but we don’t even own a VCR?!” act out is.

The big question that should have been surrounding the production of The Ring Two is: where would I, Peter Jones, come into all of this? I tell you what, I love a VHS tape. Truly. I’ve got a bunch of my own that I always fish out. I have sourced old video players just to watch them. I would be absolutely stuck on the idea of watching whatever video came into my possession. And I think we know how that would go.