Just in time for the Halloween season comes The Grudge 2, a film that sure looks creepy from the commercials and posters.  From the promotions you might be expecting a unique panorama of the disturbing that teaches your stomach how to do a flip.  But the film comes up so stale on the scares that you’ll think someone put the thrills on ‘Mute.’

The Grudge 2
1 Star

I don’t know.  I mean really, I just don’t know.  The Grudge 2 isn’t that awful of a movie.  It is, in most respects, a competent motion picture.  The shots are solid, the story-telling is clear and there’s some decent art direction.  But at the same time, nothing in the film ever comes out to actually grab the audience.  It’s just a blank few reels that try to capture the fright-infested feel for a PG-13 audience perfected by The Ring four years ago that comes up short.

Haunted houses suck.  Seriously man, don’t go in them.  They will mess you up.  Sarah Michelle Gellar learned this two years ago in the first film, but nobody listened to her.  This explains why High School Queen Bees, their followers and the Sister of Gellar’s character (Amber Tamblyn, doing crappiest acting this side of the new year acting this year) all decide to go for a nice bumbling trip into the Japanese homestead haunted by a family of pissed off spirits who, instead of just wanting to get along, curse anyone who enters their home by haunting them, and killing them shortly thereafter. 

They’re all unconnected beautiful people who’s story’s don’t connect until the end.  It’s one of those twist endings that the screenwriter must have thought “Oh sweet, this is going to be like The Sixth Sense, so it must be brilliant!”, but then it turns out that twist endings have been battered to death in the past decade; so though the script ties up all the loose knots well enough, it’s blow you back into your seat.

Bringing on Takashi Shimizu, who directed the Japanese films that both Grudge films are based off of, wasn’t a bad idea.  The kind of quiet, subdued and eerie, lingering nature of Asian film can make a great fit for horror; what better way to acquaint American audiences with a different side of film-making than importing a talent from over-seas.  The Asian influences are obvious, but Shimizu’s final product is an odd mix of the Orient and Hollywood – things are quiet and subdued, but he never translates the creepies into the film.  The scares are more American in nature; there are going to be less people thinking “Crap on a stick, did that kid just meow?  How did that happen?  Who?  What?  I’m scared!” and more people shouting “OH MY GOD WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU, IT’S THE MEOWING KID!” at the screen.  Some attempts are made to make The Grudge 2 genuinely creepy, but if you’ve seen the predisessor there’s nothing new here.  Shimizu just doesn’t have a trick up his sleeve that will frighten anyone who’s already seen The Ring, or for that matter, most horror films before.

The only job that The Grudge 2 can complete is the easiest one of all: it’s a scary movie in October with famous enough celebrities.  This, in turn, will drive middle-schoolers to have their parents drive them in Chevy Suburbans to their nearest suburban cineplex by the hoard.  Let’s face it folks – if you were a 12-year-old who didn’t know what a good Horror film was, you would love to see a scary movie to help prepare for Halloween.  Hey, you might even get some points for being able to show up at school and brag that you saw the film, as your peers stood in awe of the fact that you were brave enough to sit through such a frightening-looking film.

The acting, the story, the scares . . . the only redeeming quality of the film is that the film is never that bad.  But none of that really matters too much, the only reason anyone will see The Grudge 2 is because they’re preteens with the price of admission burning through their Old Navy jeans.