| Film Review | Dana Place |
The
Grudge 2
Amber Tamblyn
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Edison Chen
Jennifer Beals
Directed by: Takashi Shimizu
To begin, this film is a complete mess. In The Grudge 2,
Karen Davis’s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) mother sends her
sister Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn) to Japan to learn what exactly
happened in the fire from the original film and why Karen is
now in a mental asylum. Aubrey meets a journalist who fills
her in on the details of the Grudge and they trek across
Japan to find a way to save themselves from the curse of the
house. The film is interspersed with the stories of a group
of teenagers that wander into the house and a family 3,000
miles away that is affected by strange occurrences in their
apartment building.
It really isn’t difficult to figure out why most of the
audience either laughed at the unintentional comedy, stared
at the patterns on the walls of the theater, or just stared
at their watch until the credits rolled. The main plot of
the film was laughable and just got worse as it unfolded,
usually through the use of voiceover or grainy black and
white flashbacks that looked like they could have been
pulled from old Godzilla movies. The intertwined stories
were muddled and had no apparent connection to the main
story arc, until it was too late and no one really cared.
For some inexplicable reason, the filmmakers chose to
preface most of the shock moments with a sound that reminded
me of someone pulling a crazy straw through plastic lid. Why
would you warn your audience that a big scare was coming
when the entire thrill of these movies is that half-second
shock? It didn’t help that when the shock did happen, it
elicited giggles more times than not. The idea of a ghost
returning a text message and then the shot of a scared
teenage girl from the waist down running down the street
didn’t help to put people back into the mood of the film
either. Come to think of it, the director did seem to have
an unexplained fascination with shooting people from the
waist down.
The filmmakers also seemed to go out of their way to
actually slow the pace of the film and to break up any
tension that could have been built up. At points in the
movie where the film could gain momentum and tension, the
film would switch into some sort of analysis of a mother
daughter relationship, or just any excuse for someone to
cry. There were full minutes of emoting and melodrama that
really had no place at all in this horror film. The
Grudge 2 is a complete train wreck that leaves one
searching IMBD.com to see if the name “Uwe Boll” was
attached at any point in the process. Sadly, he isn’t. So
fans of the original film will have to look a little harder
to find someone to blame for this complete breakdown of a
film.
