{"id":11869,"date":"2007-03-25T05:55:34","date_gmt":"2007-03-25T09:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=11869"},"modified":"2007-03-25T05:55:34","modified_gmt":"2007-03-25T09:55:34","slug":"the-grudge-2-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/03\/25\/the-grudge-2-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grudge 2 (2006)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"03\"<\/a>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\u2019s a horror movie. While \u201cJu-On\u201d was a pleasant horror flick, I am one of many who thought \u201cThe Grudge\u201d 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\u2019s the sequel, and it\u2019s actually no different. It\u2019s repetitive, it feels like three hours, and there\u2019s really no character you can root for.<\/p>\n

After Gellar appears in a glorified cameo, Amber Tamblyn\u2019s character really doesn\u2019t fare any better. 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\u2019s sucked into the mystery. What mystery? Damned if I know. \u201cThe Grudge 2\u201d seriously has no forward progression into this story, nor do the writers seem to get where they\u2019re going with all of this. Three different story arcs follow the ghost\u2019s havoc, none with any sense of direction or actual substance. Actors are simply props dressed as characters, for the ghosts that are props themselves, to terrorize them, and that\u2019s the gist.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s no doubt about that, and in fleeting moments it works. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Grudge 2\u201d is nothing but set-up and random scares in an utterly disjointed sequence without any payoff. I sat there the entire time wondering \u201cWhere is it all leading to?\u201d and I never received an answer. The entire film leads to nothing. Literally nothing. And \u201cThe Grudge 2\u201d simply isn\u2019t a sequel you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s a horror movie. While \u201cJu-On\u201d was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[276,385,409,477,703,835,840,922,1008,1087],"class_list":["post-11869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-demons","tag-g","tag-ghosts","tag-horror","tag-mystery","tag-remake","tag-revenge","tag-sequel","tag-supernatural","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}