| Cover Art |
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| Credits |
Director: Takashi Shimizu
Starring: Noriko Sakai, Chiharu Nîyama, Kei Horie, Yui Ichikawa, Shingo Katsurayama
Screenplay: Takashi Shimizu
Music: Shiro Sato
Country: Japan
AKA: Ju-on: The Grudge 2 |
If you, like me, thought the original Ju-On/The
Grudge was a pretty ordinary experience,
you're going to want to steer well clear of
the sequel. For some bizarre reason, most of the
people I know who enjoyed the first, enjoyed the
second even more, and I cannot for the life of me
work out why. I've seen some terrible horror
films in my time, truly terrible, usually in terms
of production values – sometimes in terms
of storytelling, but most of those went completely
under the radar and currently reside in the realm
of Straight-to-Video cheese. The Grudge
2 should have been better than this. It
could have been better than this… but for
some reason, in spite of how monstrously huge the
first was in terms of success and cult favouritism, The Grudge 2 is a prime example
of good ideas murdered by terrible execution and
requires far more attention than it deserves.
The
Grudge 2 is, as the numerical title would
suggest, a direct follow on from the original
film. This presents an immediate problem: if you
have not seen the first film within twenty-four
hours prior to viewing this film, you will be
completely lost on pretty much every subtle reference
and plot point that binds the two (it may be easy
for the Japanese, but trying to remember who's
who from the first and recognising names is a
bit of a task when you're reading subtitles
and have similar looking casts). Dubious racial
ignorance aside (I truly am sorry, but the cast
is genuinely very forgettable, and their screen
time along with the story structure doesn't
help), the film itself plays out in a similarly
disjointed fashion to the first; a series of vignettes
all tied to a core story and criss-crossing each
other in a similar fashion to Jackie Brown (for
those who haven't seen the first…
but are for some reason reading a review of the
second).
The core story follows Koyoko Harase, an actress
dubbed the 'horror queen' largely
because of a single film that most people seem
to recognise her from and soon to be mother. After
her partner hits and kills a cat on the road home
one night, Koyoko sees the ghost boy from the
first film, and from that point on, she seems
to be a magnet to the malevolent force that haunted
the first. Anyway, the ghost boy appears in the
car and as you would expect, the car crashes,
and we are led to believe that Koyoko has lost
her child, and Koyoko goes into an expected bout
of depression. After all – her boyfriend
is in a coma and she's just been told she
lost her baby. Anyway, this is not the case, and
we learn soon after that she is still with child
(although the spook boy presents us with the possibility
that the baby may not be safe, or that something
is tying the two). Anyway, eventually a film crew
ropes her into appearing in a TV special about
haunted houses, and lo and behold, she is dragged
into the house where the horror began. Predictably,
the crew get bumped off in "creepy"
ways and for some reason, Koyoko is unknowingly
the focal point for the activity. Things escalate
as one would expect in ways one probably wouldn't
right up until the film's bizarre climax.
Sounds like it could be pretty good, right? Sure.
It could have been really good, if it weren't
such an awfully made film. I mentioned earlier
how terrible the production values of this film
are, every time something supposedly scary happened,
I found myself laughing or rolling my eyes –
this was like Evil Dead 2, but
at least Evil Dead 2 was meant
to be comedic as well as horrific, so the terrible
effects were often part of the gag. Not here my
friends… the film fails miserably in selling
the 'horror' of the moment, and when
the moments involve things like crawling wigs
and fully grown births, you can't help but
laugh out loud. The horror is also destroyed by
awful camera work that manages to kill pretty
much every moment that could have been somewhat
disturbing had they been timed and shot better.
The other thing that doesn't help is the
terrible acting, which is both accentuated by,
and further accentuates just how terrible the
camera work is. You know it's bad acting
too, if you can pick out bad acting in a foreign
language film.
These are big no-no's for a successful
horror film. Usually you can get away with one
or the other (most of the classics do) but all
of them combined equals horror film suicide. The
biggest problem with all of this is that the film
actually has some pretty good ideas that could
be genuinely disturbing, had they not been ruined
by lazy film making. Most of the "scares"
fall flat on their face and the ones that sort
of work are more disturbing because of their bizarre
nature than the actual horror of the moment. The
birth sequence could have been truly horrifying,
but in all honesty, once I was over the initial
"What the Hell?!" of it all, I was
in hysterics. The same goes for the majority of
the "big" scares sprinkled through The Grudge 2.
The whole thing bugs me even more because I know
that the director has already made this film once
before (which would be interesting to see for
the sake of comparison) on a lower budget, and
is being paid by Sam Raimi to make it again for
America. I suspect that it may be worth waiting
for the American release; after all, third time's
a charm… |
