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January 18, 2007

Ju-on 2

Takashi Shimizu's second Japanese theatrical Grudge movie is haunted by the legacies of what came before and what came afterward
Ju-on 2 (aka Ju-on: The Grudge 2)
Written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
Starring Noriko Sakai, Chiharu Nîyama, Kei Horie, Yui Ichikawa, Shingo Katsurayama, Takako Fuji, Ayumu Saitô
Lions Gate DVD release
Not rated
MSRP: $26.98
By Michael Marano
OK, takes notes, because there might be a quiz later. Ju-on 2 is technically the fourth Ju-on movie, following the two Japanese made-for-video originals and the previous Japanese theatrical release, Ju-on. This Japanese theatrical movie Ju-on 2 comes before the American Sam Raimi-produced The Grudge and The Grudge 2, which aren't to be confused with the upcoming Japanese theatrical release, Ju-on 3.
... feels like just franchise filler, a placeholder in the series until something better can be cooked up.
 
Ju-on 2 begins with young actress Kyoko Harase (Sakai), dubbed "The Queen of Horror" due to her having starred in several Japanese Ringu-like movies, driving home from a TV shoot with her fiancée Masashi (Saitô). The TV shoot was for a reality show about haunted places, and this particular episode dealt with the house in which the murders that are the center of the Ju-on curse took place, a curse so powerful that anybody who comes into contact with the house even indirectly is destroyed.

Kyoko, who shares a name with the woman who was murdered in the house, resents being pigeonholed as a horror actress. Her talk with Masashi is cut short; they seem to have run over a cat. A mysterious pale figure darts into the road to look at the little corpse. Something ethereal and bodiless follows the car as the two young lovers drive off.

An ... accident? ... forces the car off the road. Masashi is injured, and Kyoko, who was pregnant, miscarries.

As is the case in all the Ju-on/Grudge movies, chronology breaks down. We leap from story to story as we learn that everyone involved in the TV show shoot encounters the curse: the show's hostess, the makeup girl, the director, the makeup girl's boyfriend, even an extra who had appeared in one of Kyoko's horror movies. Kyoko's lost child seems to be at the core of this current series of deaths. What vengeance do the angry ghosts want? How will they get it? And who will pay for it?

A melted, runny, hot Grudge sundae
I really like and admire four of the six Ju-on/Grudge movies made so far, but the two that are stinkers, The Grudge 2 and Ju-on 2, are great disappointments, given how creepy the franchise is when it's in top form. It's unprecedented for any horror franchise to be under the control of one guy the way that the Ju-on/Grudge movies have been under the direction of Takashi Shimizu, and in this context, it's understandable for Shimizu to be off his game once in a while.

But what's perhaps most frustrating about Ju-on 2 is the fact that Shimizu just seems to be grasping at straws in order to whip up some quick scares. A moment in which a vengeful ghost uses a wig to inflict suffering upon the living makes one think not so much of karma and the terrors of a tortured afterlife as of a rabid, killer tribble. And for the record, ghostly wigs have been used to scary effect in Japanese horror cinema before, as is the case in the "Black Hair" segment of Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 masterpiece, Kwaidan.

Despite Shimizu's ability to use the cold and nasty darkness of a Tokyo winter to good and crawly effect and one or two truly scary moments, Ju-on 2 feels like just franchise filler, a placeholder in the series until something better can be cooked up. I'm reminded of the many deadly dull issues of the X-Men comic books in which, rather than having the X-Men actually go out and do something, like fight Magneto or bring down the Sentinels, pages upon pages are wasted on Danger Room workouts and earnest discussions of how hard it is to work as a team.

Still, four out of six for a horror franchise is pretty good, especially when you think of how tired Jason and Freddy were by their fifth outings. Even after the dire and dumb Grudge 2, this series about the lingering dead, though lingering, isn't quite dead yet.

So, given the fact that in the Ju-on/Grudge mythology, anybody who crosses paths with anybody who has had even the most fleeting contact with the curse gets saddled with the curse, how can there be anybody left in Tokyo at this point? It would be interesting to sit down with an epidemiologist and apply disease vectors to the curse to see how many people it would wipe out before somebody got the bright idea to nuke that damned cursed house from orbit! —Mike