Grudge 2 offers plenty of confusion, very few scares

October 23, 2006 —

I would like to take a moment to send a great big "Thank you" to all the moviegoers who made The Grudge such a big success. Without all of you, there would have been no sequel. And I shudder to think where I would be without The Grudge 2.

I would probably just be in the same exact theater watching a movie that isn't a complete piece of trash.

It's a shame that The Grudge 2 is so terrible. After all, the original (well, the American original) was only a slightly ridiculous mess of a movie.

The least these filmmakers could do with the second installment is live up to the franchise's established mediocrity.

But really, anyone who enjoyed the first Grudge probably never had high expectations for the sequel anyway.

Just look at The Ring 2, a follow-up to a highly successful thriller that makes Darkness Falls look like the Casablanca of horror films.

The problem with The Grudge 2 is that it starts out spooky and fizzles after about 40 minutes. At least director Takashi Shimizu was kind enough to fool everyone into thinking the movie would be halfway decent.

After the mildly entertaining scenes are over, the movie just gets confusing. After all, The Grudge 2 attempts to weave three storylines together without any explanation as to why they are related until the final five minutes of the movie.

And this would be perfectly fine if all three stories were exciting, scary, and yawn-free. Unfortunately, the Chicago scenes are absent of tension, mostly because it is difficult to scare an audience when they don't know what the hell is going on.

Every time I saw little Jake and his family, all I wanted to know was, "Who are these people and why are they in this movie?"

If you are not familiar with The Grudge and are as confused right now as I was in the theater, then here is a quick summary of the goings-on in Tokyo:

A horrible murder occurred in a house in a Japanese suburb. Allegedly, anyone who now enters this house becomes cursed and will die at the hands of the murder victim, a very creepy looking woman named Kayako.

That's about all you need to know because the plot of the second Grudge is exactly the same - or so it seems.

Eventually, it becomes clear that the screenwriters have removed the house from this haunted house story, leaving the ultra-creepy spectres from the first movie to appear wherever they please. And this gets old really fast. First the meowing kid shows up under a desk, then he's in a phone booth, then he's on a bus.

Come on guys, enough is enough. I became so desensitized to random ghost appearances that if that little Japanese boy showed up in the seat next to me, I would probably have just offered him some popcorn.

And to top it all off, this Grudge tries to be different from the first one by throwing in some crazy new explanation for the haunting and why it has become stronger. Instead of giving the movie depth, this plot alteration only makes The Grudge 2 that much more confusing and stupid.

And just now I noticed on the IMdB that there will be a Grudge 3 in the near future. And I will likely go see this one, too. And that is the most confusing and stupid thing of all.