1998, Japan. Starring Hiroyuki Sanada, Miki Nakatani, Satou Koichi, Saeki Hinako. Directed by Joji Iida.

I hate hating movies. If you've been with me for any length of time, you know that one of the things that separates me from a lot of other critics (especially online) is that I don't revel in films that are bad or "so bad they are good." I freely admit to having appalling taste, and the movies I enjoy because they entertained me, not because of any faux-hipster sense of irony or condescending "cheesy fun" aspect. It's just something I've grown out of. I don't like savaging films either, because even rotten films take a lot of work. I'm happier celebrating movies I enjoyed than I will ever be tearing apart movies I hated.

But lately, I've been paying for my relative good fortune in film with a string of unenjoyable dreck I still feel should be written about here. Sure, I'm used to coming across the occasional film I don't like, but usually I can just skip over it. Chances are if I didn't like the film, it's probably not a film I really wanted to watch in the first place. But sometimes, a movie I do want to write about ends up stinking, and the past couple weeks that has happened a lot more than it has at any other point in the past. Movies I should love and wanted to love just punched me in the gut. Take the Japanese zombie film Stacy. It's a zombie film, and a Japanese zombie film at that - something I've been quite interested in for a long time, and thus I felt compelled to write about the film despite my complete lack of enjoyment. What I didn't realize is that Stacy was little more than the harbinger of a whole slew of awful films I'd earmarked for review here thinking they'd be better than they were.

Some I knew were going to be awful from the get-go. No normal human decides he's going to review all sixteen Troublesome Night films from Hong Kong. I had to bail around five or six (they all start to blend together), but I'm determined to get through the series (which might be impossible since they seem to crank a couple new ones out every year) even if no one else in the world is watching. Others, however, I had hopes for despite reading loads of negative reviews. One such film was Rasen, the forgotten film in Japan's Ring series.

To recap the history of Ring for those who missed it in our reviews of Ring and Ring II, here's where the game stands right now. A series of books by Koji Suzuki caused quite a commotion, and a lackluster television adaptation soon followed. And a radio drama. And more television. And finally, the books were successful enough to guarantee that someone would adapt the story into a film, albeit a film that differs vastly from the novel (and in Ring II ceases to relate to the novels at all). The Ring novels take the story on a wild trip that starts as a ghost story, turns it into a medical thriller, and eventually exposes the whole thing to have been nothing more than a computer simulation (which, in the later installment of the books, goes awry and results in real world deaths). Many fans of the movies agree that the films are better for having stuck to their supernatural guns and avoided all the cyberpunk developments. I count myself among them. Plenty of other people, of course, dig the scifi/medical turn the books take and don't care for the films turning it all into something purely spuernatural. Ghosts interest me. Haywire computers do not (except, perhaps, when the ghosts are making the computers haywire, as in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo -- the best horror film since the first Ring movie). Thus, I prefer the ghost story to the medical/technical one. The makers of Rasen seem to have wanted to follow the ideas set forth in the book, but they failed miserably.

The Ring film, directed by Hideo Nakata, was even more of a sensation than the books, and in the wake of its success, dozens of films influenced by or simply ripping off the film were born. Welcome to the new wave of Japanese horror that made the last coupe years of the 20th Century and the first couple of the 21st so entertaining for horror fans. There was no doubt that the makers of Ring would return to the well (so to speak) for another installment, mainly because they'd already finished the film. That second installment was known as Rasen, or Spiral -- not to be confused with Uzumaki, which is also sometimes called Spiral.

This one stumps a lot of people. After all, there's a movie called Ring II, starring the same people in the same roles, directed by the same director, and picking up immediately where the first film begins. One would assume that to be the official sequel. And it is, but so is Rasen, a movie that was considered by Hideo Nakata (and most fans) to be so godawful that he immediately went into production on a different official sequel, the film we all know as Ring II. The problem started more or less with the greed of production company Asmik Ace Entertainment. Sensing that they had a potential hit on their hands, they hired two separate crews to work on two separate films simultaneously -- Ring and its sequel, Rasen. The thinking went that if people enjoyed the first film, they would flock to Rasen to see what else was happening. Unfortunately, one of those crews made a great horror film. The other crew made utter crap. People went to see the first film, but they stayed away in droves from Rasen.

Rasen came and went, and most people agreed that it was pretty much as horrendous as Hideo Nakata claimed, despite key members of the cast reprising their roles and the story picking up right where the first film leaves off. Rasen even apes the original film's cold, clinical appearance with some degree of competence, but at no point is there any doubt that Hideo Nakata isn't behind the helm here. Directorial duties -- as well as writing -- were left to Joji Iida, whose only other notable film is 2000's Another Heaven, which is a much better film than this one. As a director, he's passable. As a writer, he has delivered one of the foulest, dullest misfires I've seen in a long time. It's sundry missteps are transformed into thunderous stomps when you put it in the context of being a sequel to one of the most successful (not just in terms of box office receipts, either) horror films in years.

But I went into the movie with an open mind, perhaps even a determination to like the film, or at least find good points in it. I have a tendency to enjoy the least popular film in a series. You know, always sticking up for George Lazenby and the other underdogs. Like I said, I don't enjoy disliking a film and writing negative reviews. Rasen was something I definitely wanted to write about though, as we're slowly making our way through all the Ring films and their various offshoots and imitators, and once I finished the film I realized that I was going to have to get out the poison pen I so loathe inking up.

This movie is terrible. Mind-numbingly terrible. I could sit here copying negative adjectives out of the thesaurus, and that would still only begin to crack the surface of just how much I utterly despise this film. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single good thing about it despite my bull-headed determination to do so. How a movie can go so astoundingly wrong truly baffles me, and I thank the heavens that Hideo Nakata was so disgusted by the film that he went out and made a different, better sequel as a way of apologizing to people for the abomination that is Rasen.

We begin innocently enough with the autopsy of Ryuji (a role reprised by Hiroyuki Sanada, who also appeared in Hideo Nakata's own sequel, but in a greatly reduced role than the one he has here). For some reason, the permanent look of horror that graces the countenance of any who fall victim to Sadako's curse is gone, the movie having seemingly decided to drop that aspect entirely without any explanation. It's the first, but certainly not last, piece of mythology from the Ring that will be totally abandoned (maybe Iida should have read the script to the film for which he was making a sequel). That it happens within the first few minutes of the film is not a good sign for the rest of the running time.

Performing the autopsy is a former friend of Ryuji's, Andou Mitsuo (Satou Koichi), a pathologist who is so jaw-droppingly dull that he his upstaged by his own cadavers - even the ones, unlike Ryuji, who just lie there rather than rambling off a series of esoteric warnings and hiding coded messages in their stomachs. Earlier in life, Andou lost his young son to the sea in a terrible accident, a plot device that could have tied in nicely to the importance of the ocean in the first film had the director given a damn about the first film. Unfortunately, the role of the sea is jettisoned in this film, and the drowning of Andou's son becomes nothing more than a predictable plot device that lets the doctor constantly contemplate suicide so that the film can feel like it has some sort of emotional gravity. It's an attempt to give him a back story, albeit a tired and overused one. Take it though, because it's the only character this guy is going to show through the entire movie.

The fact that Ryuji's corpse won't stop talking to him leads Andou to become involved in the curse of Sadako, but this is hardly the curse or the Sadako we came to fear and love in the first film. We also hook up with Mai again (played once more by Miki Nakatani), who is investigating the death of Ryuji in a fashion far more boring than in Hideo Nakata's sequel. Her character undergoes a pretty drastic revision as well, but what the hell? That's par for the course in this film. Oh yeah, and what about Reiko? You know, the main character from the first film? Hideo Nakata's sequel handled her in a somewhat offhanded and unsatisfying manner, but at least she played some role. Here, she appears only in a flashback to a scene from the first film then is dispatched offscreen and hardly mentioned again. Same with her son, Yoichi, who becomes the focal point of Ring II. Iida seems determined to either dismiss entirely characters from the first film and replace them with far drearier, clichéd, and uninteresting characters; or he simply rewrites characters willy-nilly to be completely unlike they were before, with no real explanation for the sudden change other than the ineptness of the script.

The blatant disregard for established character traits (a symptom of making a sequel before the original is even finished) is only the tip of the iceberg though. What really sinks this film is the completely ludicrous direction it takes the plot. As our dull as dishwater doctor mopes from one scene to the next, Sadako's curse is transformed into a new strain of smallpox, and the importance of the video is nixed in favor of the claim that coming into contact with anything on the subject of Sadako can give you the disease, which is all an attempt by Sadako to be reborn into the world of the living. Forget the nightmarish apparition from the first film. Sadako makes only one appearance here, as a sexy naked woman seducing Andou, before taking over Mai's appearance. There is nary a vestige of the rage-driven ghost from the first film left in Rasen. Instead, she is a standard-issue psycho woman. Her entire reason for being is dumped in favor of this thoroughly uninteresting, daft new approach to her character.

Incidentally, if Sadako uses Mai as a vehicle to be reborn, as an incubator of sorts to harbor her DNA, why does the reborn Sadako look like Mai? Sadako's DNA was used. Mai's body had no input and was just a host. Okay, I know I shouldn't be a genetics nitpick, especially when the film as film presents so many targets at which to fire. I guess they had Miki on hand and she was already used to acting like she'd just done a bunch of downers, so they figured they'd use her rather than someone who might accidentally, you know, act or something. For the scenes in which Sadako does appear, they hired Saeki Hinako, best known to fans of Japanese horror for her roles in the Misa the Dark Angel series. She also had a part in Uzumaki, the other film sometimes called Spiral. It's enough to make your head spin. Anyway, she's about the only character who attempts to bring any life at all into her role, but it's a misguided role to begin with since it means the image of Sadako the Terrible has been dropped in favor of Sadako the Terribly Sexy. While sexy is good, it isn't necessarily scary.

But no one suffers so drastically as poor Ryuji, who is transformed from the stoic yet heroic figure of Ring into a villain with delusions of global conquest. What the hell? Good lord, what an asinine "twist." Some people seem to think that just because something is an unexpected twist, that alone makes it good. But you know what? A stranger walking up to me on the street and kicking me in the balls is an unexpected twist, but that doesn't make it enjoyable. The senseless transformation of Ryuji from understated hero to the destroyer of worlds is so utterly stupid that I can't even begin to fathom what anyone was thinking when they came up with it, or why anyone thought it was a good idea. From what I understand of the Rasen novel, this is part of the original story. But this isn't the Rasen novel. It's a movie, and a supposed sequel to Hideo Nakata's film. Thus, we have to base our impressions of Ryuji not on the book, but on the movies, and there is no transition in his character, no real purpose to the sudden and unexplained mood swing. It just happens with total disregard. It's maddening, and I know it's a result of Iida relying on the novel without considering the framework being laid down by the first film.

I'll cut the writer-director some slack here. A story this complex, with Nakata making so many changes to it for the first film in the series, should have never been filmed at the same time. Iida either didn't read or didn't grasp the screenplay to Ring, and thus probably didn't know how drastically it was altering the original story. Iida's attempts to stick to certain plot points in the novel Rasen that now no longer connected with Nakata's revisions result in a sequel film that is a train wreck. If they had waited, or if Iida had been more knowledgable about the film being made alongside his, to which his was supposed to be the sequel, they might have had better luck with consistency in the characters. But excuses, ultimately, don't make the film any easier to digest, and besides, there is plenty more to hate.

Perhaps the worst thing the plot of this movie does is nothing. I mean, I've sat through some dull movies, but this one really puts a fellow to the test. Ninety-eight minutes will feel like a four-hour Bollywood romantic comedy, only without the singing and dancing girls. Unless you thrill to scenes of a depressed doctor walking out of an office and slowly down the hallway to go sit in another office, then you're in for a long and uninteresting ride. It's not like the first film, where you quickly learned that slower scenes were building up to a climax, and everything in between was permeated by an unrelenting sense of dread. Rasen simply does nothing and has nothing to say. It's not building atmosphere, and it's not mounting the dread because nothing ever happens. There isn't even a climax. The movie basically ends with Andou sitting at his desk wondering what the answer to the puzzle is. Then Ryuji and Sadako show up to tell him, and they head off to the beach, once again failing to make any real point out of the reoccurring images of the sea. That's about it. There is an apocalyptic twist to the film's resolution that I would have liked had the rest of the film not been so stomach-churningly pathetic, but even the promise of the destruction of the world isn't enough to save this confused mess.

So how do you make one of the worst sequels of all time? Well, you take one of the most striking horror film images ever created - that of Sadako, her long, tangled hair obscuring her ghoulish face - and you simply never bring it up again. That's the same as if Halloween gave us the famous image of Michael Myers in his William Shatner mask, and then in the sequel he was just played by Ben Affleck without any mask or other defining feature from the first film. Then you take the characters that were likable from the first film and forget them, turn them into misanthropic villains, or replace them with new characters who are so boring that they'll actually make you cry. Then you take whatever chilling atmosphere was attained by the first film and replace it all with scenes of a doctor sitting at his desk thinking about maybe doing something, which he then decides against. There's zero atmosphere and zero scares.

That Andou fellow is no leading man, either. He's utterly forgettable. He does nothing. I don't even think he knows he's supposed to be acting. I've seen characters in Italian zombie films that had more dimension and more purpose than this guy. Wooden doesn't even begin to describe how bad his performance is, and since he and Mai are the only two characters of note in the entire film, their interplay becomes positively crushing. Koichi Sato has no excuse at all -- the man is no novice actor. I don't know what his problem is here. I can only assume he was told to act like he'd just popped enough 'ludes to drop Elvis. Miki Nakatani gets to take her subdued Mai character over the top and turn her into a sex-starved, giggling harpy during the final portion of the film, but for the first half, she is every bit as somnabulistic in her delivery as the doctor. The scenes between the two of them comprise almost the entire film, and they are doing nothing but talking. I like a good dialogue film as much as the next film nerd, but this isn't a good dialogue film. This is the sort of dialogue film that makes you want to reach into the screen and throttle the characters. They perform with a lack of emotion and excitement so profound that characters from a Bergman film would scream at them to liven things up a little.

One of the most frustrating things about Rasen is that there are actually a couple good ideas buried in the muck. Sadako's curse as smallpox is goofy (however, that's pretty close to what the curse is revealed to be in the books, so I guess again it's just a case of me prefering Hideo Nakata's supernatural excursion to the original novel's medical approach), but some of the ideas about Sadako creating a never-ending spiral that will spread throughout the world were promising had they not been surrounded by such a poorly conceived film. Rather than reminded me of the first film, this reminded me of the Hong Kong Ring rip-off, A Wicked Ghost, which had some really interesting ideas and twists but was simply not that good a movie - though it's still infinitely better than Rasen.

Chief among Rasen's could-have-beens is it's transformation of Sadako from a victim to a predator, a sexual predator to be exact. Frankly, I much prefer the tragic villain approach that began in Ring and continued through the series proper, culminating in Ring 0: Birthday really portraying Sadako as the ultimate victim in the story. However, revealing Sadako as not just a simple victim, but as sexually aggressive as well, could have been interesting if executed properly. Unfortunately, this script isn't up to the delicate task. Rasen more or less does away with any sense of tragedy (or simply fails to effectively relay it) surrounding Sadako. She is a villain. Not a malevolent force or a wronged spirit back for revenge, and in true femme fatale form, sex is her weapon.

Similar territory was explored in the Korean Ring Virus far more effectively and without sacrificing the sympathy one feels for Sadako. Rasen cannot handle a character with so much depth -- or any depth, actually. By changing the nature of Sadako, they loose the interest generated by her tragedy, and they fail to make any real statement with the new direction. Ultimately, it becomes little more than a few seconds of titillation during some sex scenes which feel shockingly out of place given the beautiful restraint of the first film. As presented, the film never successfully uses the increased sexual content to any purpose. It seems cheap.

Sorry if this review is spoiler heavy, but since the plot is so inane and the twists so idiotic, I really don't feel that bad. Plus, Ring II more or less negates everything in Rasen and eliminates it from the Ring series canon, so there's not much to worry about. Count yourself among the lucky ones if you never see this film.

I find that when I don't like a movie I didn't expect or hope to like, it's no big deal. But when a movie I was fighting for disappoints me to such a profound degree as Rasen, the pain is amplified tenfold, to the point where if I wasn't a man of peace, I'd be tempted to hop the next flight to Japan, track down Joji Iida, and punch him in the belly for having made such a thoroughly moronic movie.

Rasen offers me precious little to work with when it comes to positive comments. The film's few interesting ideas are buried in the avalanche of sheer stupidity that comprises the bulk of the picture. The plot is complete junk, the performances are dull but not nearly so dull as the characters they strive to create, and the directing is uninspired. Nearly everything from the first film is thrown out the window in favor of something far stupider and less interesting. Ring II had it's flaws, but it's a welcome return to the canon and sensibilities of the first film. Thank God Nakata felt obliged to help wash the sour taste of Rasen out of our collective mouth. Rasen really is one of the least enjoyable movies I've ever seen.

In short, the lost Ring movie should stay that way.

Labels: Country: Japan, Horror: Ghosts, Series: Ring, Year: 1998