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Shimizu does have in his corner, some truly
eerie sequences that really did manage to garner a shudder here and
there. Aside from the goofy attempt to downplay Arielle Kebbel’s utter
sex appeal, Kebbel pulls in a competent performance paired with some
rather morbid effects including one strobe effect involving Kayako and
exploding lights, and a pretty creepy dream sequence. The tension in
there, there’s no doubt about that, and in fleeting moments it works.
The curse gathers in the next place of
death, says the opening subtitles. You just have to love how such a nice
house is considered a place of death. Give me a nice house with a ghost
over my current apartment any day of the week. Now that’s a horror
movie. While “Ju-On” was a pleasant horror flick, I am one of many who
thought “The Grudge” was simply a horrible movie. Void of any
atmosphere, and completely missing the point of the original, turning
Kayako into a run of the mill monster, as opposed to her actual purpose
in the original. Well, here’s the sequel, and it’s actually no
different. It’s repetitive, it feels like three hours, and there’s really no
character you can root for. After Gellar appears in a glorified cameo,
Amber Tamblyn’s character really doesn’t fare any better.
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She appears with a basically cheesy set-up
being the black sheep of her family, and is ordered by her
mother to get Gellar back home, and she’s sucked into the
mystery. What mystery? Damned if I know. “The Grudge 2”
seriously has no forward progression into this story, nor do
the writers seem to get where they’re going with all of
this. Three different story arcs follow the ghost’s havoc,
none with any sense of direction or actual substance. |
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Actors are simply props dressed as
characters, for the ghosts that are props themselves, to terrorize them,
and that’s the gist. And when the story does actually manage to
get desperate, it begins to connect the three sub-plots rather
anxiously, thus we have two utterly under developed pointless arcs,
while one is created to serve as nothing more than a blatant preamble to the third film which
will likely be set in an apartment building. “The Grudge 2” is nothing
but set-up and random scares in an utterly disjointed sequence without
any payoff. I sat there the entire time wondering “Where is it all
leading to?” and I never received an answer. The entire film leads to
nothing. Literally nothing. And “The Grudge 2” simply isn’t a sequel
you’ll remember an hour after finishing.
In spite of some moments of genuine tension and visuals, Shimizu's entry
into a pretty awful franchise is disjointed, weak, and void of any sense
of logic, or purpose. It's a random series of attempted frights that
fails at every turn.
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