The Grudge 2

Either you liked the first Grudge, or you didn't. I loved it; it was the first movie to actually scare me in a long time. It had a lot of material that could either be seen as scary or goofy, depending on how you watch it: Were you in the right mood, did you give it your full attention, did you turn the lights off, etc. After all, I'm not usually afraid of naked Japanese boys who meow. But the Grudge makes it work.

But the meowing boy isn't the star of the show. The Grudge, along with the Ring, introduced American audiences to the creature a friend of mine calls the "Shaky Girl" (or was that "Jerky Girl"? Either one works). The Shaky Girl is an undead girl (or young woman), with long hair that covers her entire face, who walks in an unnatural jerky style slowly but inexorably towards her victim. She can sometimes be spotted climbing down town the stairs, bending her arms and legs in inhuman ways in the process. Her chief weapon is simply fear - in fact, audiences are never shown exactly how she kills her victims, and that absence of knowledge makes her even more frightening. In addition to the Ring and the Grudge, the Shaky Girl has also been seen in the video game Fear, the movie Stay Alive (briefly), half a dozen trailers for horror movies coming out next year, and about 100 Japanese horror flicks that haven't been remade here yet. Eventually she'll be so commonplace that she won't be any scarier than Freddy, Jaws, or King Kong. But until then, I'm enjoying every one of her fifteen minutes.

Anyway, the Grudge 2 picks up right where the last one left off. It doesn't add much new to the plot, except to give a little bit of history to the ghost. I'd say there's a little less exposition this time, and a few more scare scenes. Unfortunately, the scares are pretty much the same - same shaky girl, same little boy. At times it felt like I was just watching deleted scenes from the first movie. But so? I liked the first movie enough to watch it over and over, so the "extra footage" is more than welcome.

The first Grudge was a little hard to follow for a couple of my friends, because it went back and forth in time. This one does the same, but since one time period is in America and the other is in Japan, it's a lot easier to keep them separate. The movie is pretty easy to sum up: Lots of people die. In fact,

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...I'm pretty sure that every character who has a speaking role is dead by the end of the movie. Okay, there was one crazy guy playing peek-a-boo on a bus who lived, but he was just a background character. So don't expect a Freddy-esque "maybe if we bury her bones on holy ground she can't come back" type of ending. It's just two hours of people getting killed in delightfully scary (but generally bloodless) ways. ...And I love it.