First, the good news. The pre-release blitz screening I attended was at a marvelous retro pleasure-palace real movie house, seven-hundred twenty people off the cold streets, predominantly nervous teens munching popcorn. Now the bad. The Ring Two is the second worst film of 2005; second, only to hedge bets in the highly impossible case that some atrocity will appear in the remaining ten-and-a-half months to snatch the gold merry-go-round ring.

Knowledge of the box-office first in the series, itself based on Ringu, is not necessary, though Hideo Nakata directed both that Japanese original and this present sequel. All you know, and all you need to know, is that the first American entry had something to do with circular pattern-structures and a video followed up by some phone calls or other. In Two, TV sets turn on mysteriously, remotes do nothing, and there are a few snowy images, but, minutes into this sequel, the video cassette drops from consciousness -- burned, it actually does return, but to little effect -- and in any case is never explained. Ditto the ring itself, although there are round eyes, half-fountains, a drawing of dancers linked in a circle after Matisse’s La Danse variations, a sky viewed from inside a well (half-covered, it looks more a crescent-moonish DreamWorks logo), and, though bathtubs are Pacific Northwest claw-foot, a drain-hole far short of Psycho’s league.

Following nastiness in Seattle -- your usual dead getting back in by possessing or replacing the innocent living -- single mom Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) gives up her job to relocate a hundred-twenty miles downcoast in 10,000-population Astoria, Oregon, so that son Aidan (David Dorfman) may more easily recover from the trauma. But you can’t kill the already dead who refuse to accept finality, and a supposedly grisly but actually hilarious local crime alerts the woman that Samara (Daveigh Chase in archival footage; Kelly Stables as Evil Samara) is back at it.

Rachel has a knack for unrealistically simply walking in where access is denied -- ambulances, police stations, hospitals -- but that will not help, nor can handsome Max (Simon Baker), her newspaper co-worker and threatened love interest. Maternal love and sacrifice, cheapo nightmares and PPD --post-production depression, it should be -- branched flames, flapping windows and oozy stuff (don’t blanch, it’s only water, standing in for amniotic fluid) are all flashed by, then spelled out by Samara’s happily institutionalized mother Evelyn (Sissy Spacek, going the elderly Bette Davis route).

Aidan is so photo-tech nerdy that one hopes the dead do spirit him away. But even the boy genius’s photographs are wasted to no effect, unlike the suggestive use of stills in the original Diabolique and Blowup. There are moments, as for example an absurd spider-human climbing a well-wall, and you have not lived until you experience the out-of-left-field attack by the maddened CGI elk, later fittingly punished as a limbo pile of antlers.

Under the difficult circumstances, the actors admirably keep straight faces even to the onslaught of raspberry music, but The Ring Two really owes its audience points and has to be seen to be believed. However, I wish I hadn't seen it.

(Released by DreamWorks Pictures and rated "PG-13" for violence/terror, disturbing images, thematic elements and some language.)