The Grudge 2

RATED: PG-13 for mature thematic material, disturbing images/terror/violence, and some sensuality.
RUNNING TIME: 95 MINUTES
PLOT: In Tokyo, a young woman is exposed to the same mysterious curse that afflicted her sister. The supernatural force, which fills a person with rage before spreading to its next victim, brings together a group of previously unrelated people who attempt to unlock its secret to save their lives.
STARS: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Karen Davis), Amber Tamblyn (Aubrey Davis), Edison Chen (Eason), Arielle Kebbel (Allison), Jennifer Beals (Trish).

Gord Burt 2 Stars

While the original Grudge had a fairly interesting premise - go into a haunted house, meet some ghosts and die - The Grudge 2 doesn’t even try to make sense as the evil ghosts show up everywhere now. They’re in Tokyo. They’re in the haunted house. They’re at the hospital. They’re in Chicago. Heck, they’re at the snack bar buying a bucket of popcorn and a super size soda.

Fortunately, what The Grudge 2 lacks in plot, it makes up for in cheap titillating scares, but only for a while. Creator and director Takashi Shimizu is great at cramming his ghosts into strange places and then scaring the beejeezus out of you as they pop out from wherever they’ve been hiding. You have to keep looking in the background, in the mirror, and around the corner.

The only place Takashi doesn’t place his creepy-as-all-hell ghosts is up the teenage stars’ skirts, which is surprising considering the film is stuffed to the gills with half-naked schoolgirls and leggy blond cheerleaders. The filmmakers seem to take particular glee in finding ways to get them haunted, tortured and eventually killed by Kayako and her freaky kid.

There’s nothing new in The Grudge 2 except cast members. The movie continues the events of the first film, allowing its star Sarah Michelle Gellar to hang around for a few minutes before succumbing to the curse that attached itself to her after she entered the house. Amber Tamblyn is ideal as Gellar’s sister as they both have doe eyes that well up with tears when you know something bad is about to happen. Several of the interchangeable teenage girls are cute but, in the end, are expendable. It’s a sad commentary on the quality of the entire cast that the best performance comes from newcomer Matthew Knight, who makes Jake the only emotionally credible character in sight.

By the end of the movie you’ll be ready for everyone in the film to drop dead. The movie is not excessively long, but ever second over 90 minutes feels unbearable. Base-level thrills only work so long and The Grudge 2 is too stretched out leaving you with a sense of bored futility.

Erin Harde 2 Stars

It’s incredible how a sequel can take the stuffing out of a great idea, and even ruin the original from which it stemmed. The first Grudge, at the least the first American adaptation of the movie, was adrenaline-pumping, scream-out-loud, pee-your-pants scary.

There was the creepy little boy always cowering and expelling cat yowls. But it was the broken Japanese women with the long black hair covering her face who incited real terror as crawled in her agonizingly slow, disjointed way towards her victims who were paraylzed with fear. It was a great horror movie and they should have left it as such.

With the same tricks, the sequel can hardly illicit the reaction garnered by the original. The boy and his mother are still the main ghouls, but their shock value is diminished because the treatment is so similar to the first. They come out of pictures, hide in school locker rooms, materialize out of mirrors and sneak up under the covers. The only new trick is the woman making her signature throat noise into one of the girl’s cell phones. She not only wants to kill them but use up their air time too.

Sarah Michelle Gellar returns but quickly hands the torch to Amber Tamblyn who plays Karen’s sister. Tamblyn plays the character well and impressively imitates the same expressions of horror that Gellar managed in the original, lending credibility to their relationship as sisters. Karen meets an ugly demise, which, one might think, would inspire Aubrey to high tail it back to the States. Instead she feels the need to investigate Karen’s death.

What she learns is that the curse isn’t contained within the house. The evil hair woman can follow anyone anywhere, which leads to a sub-plot set in Chicago. It’s the more interesting part of the movie because it’s mysterious and not a replica of the original. In the end though, even the sub-plot caves to a predictable ending. If the original was worthy of screams, the best this sequel can muster is a groan.