The Grudge 2

Going in, this movie has two things working against it: Firstly, it's the sequel to a movie that wasn't very good in the first place. Secondly, the first movie at minimum told us more-or-less what we needed to know about the haunting. There was a final shock to provide room for a sequel, but I feel this movie horribly under-uses that opportunity. If the ghosts are no longer bound to the house, then why are we still going back to the house at all? Why not have them rampage all over Tokyo? Or follow Karen (Sarah Michelle-Gellar) home to America?

This film did give me the creeps with at least one visual. A girl slowly drinks milk straight from the carton, then throws it up right back into the carton, then begins drinking again. I imagine this was a metaphor for the karmic cycle of the haunting. I don't deny that the movie has had thought put into it, it's just not thought that I especially care about.

In this film Aubrey (Arielle Kebbel), Karen's sister, is told by their bedridden mother (Joanna Cassidy) that she must go to Japan to retriever her now-insane sister. I suspect Gellar didn't want to be in this film, because her screen time is fairly minimal, and she kills herself fairly early in the movie. Instead, Aubrey teams up with a journalist name Eason (Edison Chen).

I felt like the attempts to expand the story in this film seemed fairly ineffective. We discover that Kayako (Takako Fuji) was trained by her mother (Ohga Tanaka) as an exorcist. Apparently this has something to do with why she and her family became ghosts, because dying in a horrible way wasn't sufficiently terrifying enough.

This is shown in parallel to the story of Allison (Ariell Kimble), a Japanese school girl who enters the house on a dare, and what happens to her and the bullies who entered with her. While Allison might learn far less, I'd say most of the actual scares come from her story. A series of creepy things happen because she's under attack by ghosts.

...oh, and pretty much everyone dies...duh...

As with the last movie, I feel like this movie tries far too hard to be subtle. Some extended scares would have gone a long way. As it is, it's probably marginally better than the first Grudge, but only marginally.