For those of you who are new to the premise of “The Ring,” it is a horror/mystery about a possessed videotape, in which a viewer only has seven days to live after watching it. Only a few minutes into the 2002 film “The Ring,” heroine Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) attempts to uncover the mystery surrounding her niece’s bizarre death.

As she seeks out a rational explanation for the teenage girl’s death, she watches the eerie videotape. After viewing, Rachel is immediately plagued by strange occurrences, and soon finds herself trying to evade the same dark fate.

The second installment, “The Ring Two,” picks back up with the same characters from the first movie. Rachel, the journalist who confronted the dark enigma of the mysterious videotape in the first onset, moves from Seattle to the quaint coastal town of Astoria, Ore., where she and son Aidan (David Dorfman) attempt to restore their blemished lives.

It’s easy to become confused in the first few minutes if you haven’t watched the first movie. For instance, after Rachel destroys a copy of the cursed videotape, she and her son are suddenly tormented by the mysterious ghost Samara. Of course, one suspects she might be the menacing evil that is embedded within the reel of film. The pale and disheveled little girl lurks around Aidan and eventually possess him.

As Rachel attempts to defend her son, the movie starts to heavily derail. The words “what is this?” might burst out of your mouth at this point, especially if you had enjoyed the first film. With a well-crafted story and the evidently talented director, Gore Verbinski, at the wheel the result was a cerebral and haunting film that the second film can’t match.

In the first movie, the lighting, the wraithlike images and the mood conspired to create a sense of danger that few horror films can live up to. The fact that you actually watched what was on this fateful tape was also an unusual clincher.

In the second film, Rachel is ridiculously fending off a ghost. It was a much more intriguing venture when she was trying to solve a macabre mystery. The second film does, however, have a few of the savory features that the first had, such as a few ghostly images and a riveting score, but it falls short of the type of splendor the first movie offered its audience.

Although the second film can provide the audience with a few cheap jolts, such as when dozens of stags suddenly attack Rachel’s car, its lousy treatment of the plot and cinema mechanics make it as much of a waste of film as those kill-’em-all slashers.