The Grudge 2

Yet another Hollywood remake of a Japanese psycho-thriller (those weird ghost stories that have now become an import cottage industry), filmmaker Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge 2 is a dreary sequel to the 2004 Sarah Michelle Gellar hit about a young woman named Karen Davis whose visit to a haunted house in Tokyo sets off a chain of mayhem-tinged events caused by vengeful spirits. Here, Karen's sister Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) travels to Japan only to be menaced by the same forces, as is the local journalist investigating Karen's death (Gellar has a very brief cameo). But that's only one plot thread. In another, introduced first but occurring years later (part of the chronological fracturing the viewer will have to work out if the movie's going to make much sense), a fish-out-of-water American student at a Tokyo school is taken to the spook house by some nasty classmates. And there's a third narrative line involving a Chicago family troubled by a strange hooded figure and spooky sounds in their new apartment. The essential premise here—that powerful spirits can not only attack people but also be “carried” to ever-more distant climes so that their curse will exponentially spread—is obvious. But The Grudge 2 is really just a succession of creepy sequences in which ghosts appear suddenly from out of frame (accompanied by a loud audio blast) to grab some new victim. A needlessly complicated, totally redundant, and comparatively weak-at-the-box-office follow-up to the mediocre original, this is not recommended. [Note: Available in either unrated widescreen or full screen versions, or a PG-13 rated full screen version, DVD extras on the unrated edition include four production featurettes: “Holding a Grudge: Kayako & Toshio,” “East Meets West,” “Ready When You Are Mr. Shimizu,” and “The Grudge 2 Storyline Development,” all featuring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the cast and crew (50 min. total), five deleted scenes (13 min.), an eight-minute cast and crew montage, three short films—“Tales from The Grudge”—with an intro by executive producer Sam Raimi (8 min.), and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a bad sequel.] (F. Swietek)