The grudge that keeps on trudging

The first installment of this sure-to-be-long series wasn’t anything to write home about. The second one isn’t much better.

The Grudge 2 picks up where the first one left off. Sort of. Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is in a Tokyo hospital and her estranged sister, Aubrey (Amber Tamblyn), hops on a plane from Cali to make sure everything’s OK. Aubrey meets up with a local journalist, Eason (Edison Chen), and together they try to solve the puzzle of the house and the curse (aka “grudge") and what happened to Karen.

In another storyline, which takes place two years later, a couple of international-high school girls venture into the creepy old house where the whole thing started. They, of course, are greeted by the ghosts of the original inhabitants, whose wrath was apparently made worse by the fire Karen started in the first flick.

To make things even more confusing, there’s a third story, of a family in Chicago, but no year is given and there’s no evident tie-in with the other characters. Something is obviously wrong there, though.

The weird time element is jarring, but ultimately makes the film fun to watch. The whole Chicago storyline isn’t solved until the end, which at least makes for some surprises. And there are some very strange scenes, some of which are left unexplained (Grudge 3, anyone?).

One of the problems with the first film—a remake of a Japanese horror movie (2003’s Ju-on)—was that it tried to be international. It didn’t try hard enough. In part two, it’s more of the same. When Aubrey visits Karen in the hospital, she needs Eason to translate for her because the nurses don’t speak English. But a few scenes later, Eason is shown interviewing a police detective in English rather than Japanese. Did the filmmakers just not want to force mainstream movie-goers to have to read subtitles?

Stupid inconsistencies (and there are plenty) aside, at least The Grudge 2 delivers a few good jolts, a few good laughs and a storyline that, even if it isn’t suspenseful, keeps you guessing.