In the 80's, the Talking Head's released a concert film called Stop Making Sense. The title immediately came to mind when I sat down to write this review for The Ring Two.

Ring Two picks up six months after the end of part one. Rachel (Naomi Watts) and Aidan (David Dorfman) have moved to a small Oregon town to rebuild their lives. Rachel is working at a small town newspaper and Aidan is still creepy. Of course, two hapless teens (Ryan Merriman and Emily VanCamp) have come across the video, one ends up dead and the other kind of catatonic. Of course, this means that evil child Samara (Kelly Stables) is back. This time around she wants Rachel to be her mommy and she'll do anything including possessing poor Aidan to make that happen. Ever the reporter, Rachel must dig deeper to find out the truth about Samara.

There are a handful of creepy moments in The Ring Two but they come at the price of the plot. The director of the original Japanese Ringu, Hideo Nakata, on which The Ring was based, makes his American directing debut with this film. He does a good job creating the atmosphere and the mood. But it just wasn't enough.

Maybe the producers should have recruited the original screenwriter, Hiroshi Takahashi, as well. Instead screenwriter Ehren Kruger abandons the rules of the original and replaces them with more implausible and incredulous ones - not to mention ridiculous dialogue.

Gary Cole has a brief but comical cameo as the realtor who has to sell the Morgan home. It was supposed to be funny and it worked. Sissy Spacek, on the other hand, as Samara's institutionalized mother, wasn't supposed to be funny. She was supposed to be scary but came across as laughable. The last unintentionally comedic role belonged to a series of evil deer. While they can wreck havoc on a car, deer are just not sinister animals. A pack of wild dogs can be terrifying. A lone mountain lion can be scary. A big grizzly bear can be frightening. But deer? Maybe they were a little scary when they were attacking Rachel and Aidan in the car but when Nakata goes in for close-ups on the wannabe menacing-looking CG-generated deer, it was comical. Maybe next time, they can go for some satanic squirrels.