Rasen (1998)

Shot and released side-by-side with the original Ringu, Rasen is the 'lost' sequel that no one talks about. Well, at least, until now. You see, this film was doomed from the start. An adaptation of Koji Suzuki's Spiral, his original sequel to Ring, Rasen stuck much closer to the source material, which inevitably created serious problems when fans of Ringu showed up to see a sequel to the film they loved, yet were greeted with something almost completely alien. The situation was all the weirder considering the fact that much of the cast from the original film reprise their roles here, and that a number of details unique to Ringu ended up being brought over anyway. Add everything together, and you have a film that must have really thrown fans for a loop (no pun intended) back in its day. This must have seemed like no less than sacrilege. Needless to say, it wasn't a hit, and in the decades since its release, it has largely been forgotten by all but the most dedicated Ring fans.

Those who, like me, are familiar with the books, have in front of them a more complicated question: all that aside, is this a solid adaptation of Suzuki's book, itself a wild and often bizarre remix of his original story, that was maligned simply because its different? Or is this just a bad film, all around? Well, let's get into it then.

Remember Ryuji Takayama from Ring and its film adaptation? Well, our new lead, Ando, is a young pathologist who gets involved in Sadako's curse after examining Ryuji's corpse and finding a clue buried within that indicates that he was trying to communicate with his old friend Ando at the moment of his death. Somehow. Elsewhere, Reiko and her son are now dead, and the videotape no longer seems to kill those who watch it. What has happened? Have the rules changed? It's up to Ando and his friend Miyashita, a colleague and friend with useful knowledge of viral phenomena, to find out.

Besides the places where deviant aspects of Ringu are kept over Suzuki's original stories, like the existence of Reiko, and her and Ryuji's estranged relationship with one another, the film is generally pretty faithful to the text. Occasionally, they may tighten things up, like doing away with the original clue found in Ryuji's corpse in favor of a simpler, somehow less absurd one, or playing around with the structure of the story so that all the exciting stuff and revelatory bits are saved for the final act, but it's generally a 1:1 affair. I do applaud the way that not every character believes in the supernatural automatically in this version, so that they take some convincing at least, but that's only a small thing. And yet, when our lead watches the tape, he immediately takes the rumors of it being dangerous to heart and automatically assumes he's marked for death the moment the tape ends; this despite no threatening phone call and very little in the way of concrete information about the tape that doesn't come from one strange guy's journal.

But for the most part, this is the same old Spiral, complete with far too much recapping, restating and recontextualizing in the middle. Sadako's death is reverted back to how it was in the books, and so is her age: she's now a sexy young woman again, a ghostly femme fatale that wants Ando's hot bod so that she can make lots of little baby Sadakos and take over the world. 

The thing is, in its written form, this controversial sequel was written by the same person, and came from the same head, as that which conceived of and wrote Ring; like it or not. So despite any issues you may have with it, there's a consistency there that helps make the bizarre twists and turns seem...  Authentic? This film, on the other hand, didn't come from the director of Ringu, Hideo Nakata. No, the man responsible for this film is a man called George Iida, and let me tell you: he's no Hideo Nakata. While the screenwriting is competent enough, if still unremarkable at best and outright clumsy at worst, the presentation and feel are way off. It feels like a Japanese soap: terrible acting, cringey melodrama, and bombastic, cheap muzak sitting behind it all. The visuals look pretty much like you'd expect, so good job there, but everything else? Kind of hard to stomach until the third act gets going, and even then, it's too late for anything close to full marks. 

The ending, while fun to experience at least once, especially for those that enjoy the original and have never read the gonzo-ass book series, can't really salvage what is a tough sell, and one that isn't executed as competently as it probably deserved. The WTF quotient is quite high throughout, but you can only ever have your mind blown the one time, and then you'll be older, wiser, and may suddenly feel that this pulpy nonsense is beneath you. But your mileage may vary. In many ways, this is to the original Ringu what Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was to the original Metal Gear Solid: it takes apart and reassembles its strange meta-narrative again and again before our eyes, ending on a note as cryptic as it is apocalyptic. Not much else out there dares to be this bold, and that should at least be celebrated, but let's just not get wrapped up in the minutia and forget that this film doesn't make all it could of this insane yarn.