I was decidedly under-whelmed by 2002's The Ring, which, despite slick direction from Gore Verbinski and a pair of fine performances by Naomi Watts and David Dorfman, was a murky mess that ultimately collapsed under its own weight. And so, when The Ring Two was announced and it was revealed that Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese Ring films, was on board, I had a renewed sense of hope. But as it is written in the Gospel of Horror Movies that all sequels should be more confusing and less scary than the originals, so it is with The Ring Two, a misbegotten, unwanted child that is dreadfully boring and entirely nonsensical.

The Ring Two picks up a few months after the events of The Ring. Rachel Keller (Watts) and her son Aidan (Dorfman) have pulled up stakes and moved to Oregon in an effort to leave behind their troubles with Samara, the ghostly little girl on the cursed videotape. Rachel gets a job as editor of a newspaper in Astoria, a tiny little town where the biggest news is a cat stuck in a tree. That is, until reports of a homicide start coming in over the police scanner. Rachel travels to the scene of the crime, where all signs point to the dreaded Cursed Videotape that killed everyone in The Ring. Partially flooded house? Check. Victim's face contorted in agonized horror? Check. Cursed Videotape in VCR? Check. In one of the more sensible moments of the movie, Rachel grabs the tape, takes it to some secluded spot, and tosses it into a fire. That's not the end of the curse, though. Revealing abilities beyond her standard trick of walking herky-jerky-like out of TV sets and killing people, Samara moves from the tape to the real world and tries to posses young Aidan. With her son in the hospital suffering from a combination of hypothermia and demonic possession, Rachel is left to piece together the mystery of Samara's curse for a second time, because, after all, she never really figured it out the first time around. It turns out that the woman who tossed Samara down a well and got the whole spook show rolling was not, in fact, her mom. That honor belongs to Evelyn (Sissy Spacek), a mental patient who also tried to kill Samara because she believed Samara to be possessed by "something from the waters beyond this world."

Wait, what? So, at this point, it's clear everyone's just making this up as they go, which was precisely the problem with "The Ring." Samara is, by turns, a demon hell-beast bent on mass murder by videotape and a creepy dead child looking for some mother-daughter bonding time. In another non-sequitur scare sequence, a horde of reindeer attack Rachel and the possessed Aidan on their way home from a fair. Wow, cool, reindeer! But there's no explanation as to why Santa's helpers are so angry; later on, Rachel discovers an abundance of antlers while poking around Samara's old house, but that just raises even more questions. Horror movies generally aren't known for an abundance of internal logic, but some consistency would be nice.

Also irksome is the seed of a really good fright flick hidden in all this. During a sequence in the hospital, a suspicious doctor obliquely charges Rachel with abusing her son, mentioning that Rachel suffered a bout of post-partum depression after Aidan's birth. The whole cursed-videotape/demon-from-beyond stuff is too much a logistical nightmare to be effectively scary, but the possibilities of an unsettling psychological thriller about the perils and pitfalls of motherhood, with some ghost action thrown in for flavor, are palpable. That potential is tossed out the window, replaced by some more silly rules-Samara can hear everything people say, except when they're asleep, for instance-and a less than suspenseful climax.

Of course, I'd be willing to overlook all of this if only the movie were remotely scary. Perhaps I'm callous and jaded from years of watching horror films, but there's nothing frightening enough to make you hide your face during the movie. There's no suspense, no scares and no fun in The Ring Two, just an endless circle of unanswered questions and wasted potential.