Low cost and high quality: Japan is king when it comes to assembly line production ethos and The Grudge 2 director Takashi Shimizu takes that manufacturing approach in constructing this latest edition in the Grudge series. Block by block, shock by shock, he builds a movie that runs fine and looks slick. It’s a solid product in terms of celluloid, but there is no soul, no artistry, in the merchandise. What went wrong? Enthusiasm. Shimizu seems to take pride only in the technical proficiency of his work. Actors be damned. Plot be damned. While there’s nothing wrong with a really well-made but vacuous art-horror film, there is no art in the The Grudge 2, just cleverly staged shock shots stapled on to the other like the reels of skin in Suicide Club.
Perhaps this calculating demeanor is because Shimizu’s essentially made the same film six times now. The first Ju-on in 2000. The second in 2000 as well. Then he did both of them again in 2003. Then the American remake in 2004. That makes The Grudge 2 the sixth version of the same film made in only six years-and none of them have been outstanding. It’s not surprising that the film feels mechanized, paint by numbers. Shimizu has either got it down so pat that he can operate on autopilot or he’s just bored senseless.
The new film adopts the same structure as the first, which, basically, is to say it has no structure at all. The formula, though, is clear: Don’t go in the cursed house. Ever. Certainly don’t go in the attic. If you do, a dead Japanese woman—of such ethnicity because her long black hair is more in vogue in horror these days than bleach-blond white girl—will ferociously bug out her eyes and sic her young son (also murdered, still expert at meowing and hiding behind household objects) on you.
The plot consists of random opportunities for the titular grudgely ghoulies (a family of pale ghosts) to plague the lives of common day schoolgirls (and one reporter) and scare the crap out of them while pulling them through mirrors or phone booths. There’s really no reason to see the first film in the series (you get the back story three of four times in this film) but it goes a little something like this: A long time ago a man killed his wife, child, and obnoxious black cat. Then he hung himself.
This ghastly crime was so atrocious it reverberates down through history and anyone entering the house the family was killed in will be haunted by the family unto death (or disappearance). Keeping with every J-horror cliché (Shimizu invented most of them) the mother ghost (with long black hair hanging in front of her eyes, natch) moves like she’s being stop motion animated by teens looking to put something up on YouTube, the little boy ghost pops out from under desks and howls like a cat with laryngitis, and the dad rarely makes an appearance but when he does it’s usually to crack some necks. Simple enough. And those visitations were creepy enough to fill the short running time of the first movie, but The Grudge 2 has no new game. We’re treated to almost every ghosting and gruesome dispatch from the first film, just in a different order.
Possibly the worst part of the movie? The editing. The continual cutting back and forth between the separate plot lines is confusing, and has a dulling effect on what should be mounting tensions leading to the climax. And what a disappointing climax. There is one bright side, though. Shimizu knows how to light a scary set piece. Of course, if you’ve done this 5 times already, then you’d be pretty good at doing such a task too.
These days, spinach is scarier than anything that unfolds in The Grudge 2. The film is such a waste, it could have benefited from the inspired and truthful title found in a teen sex comedy. “The Grudge Number Two” comes closer to the mark.