Customer Reviews
Director Shimizu pushes the concept further. - By: epicentremaximus, 13 Jul 2008 
Hmmm, here we are again, with tons of reviews by people who don't seem to like Japanese horror or psychological horror but feel compelled to trash something because it's a successful franchise.
The good news is that for me at least, Jo-On The Grudge 2 held it's own perfectly well with the original. You can see from this & his more recent Reincarnation that director Shimizu Takashi doesn't appear to be the kind of guy to keep making exactly the same film, but retains the most effective elements & adds new ones to further develop both his style & the scope of the story.
As with Reincarnation, I was watching this in a slightly critical frame of mind thinking "go on, scare me" & found that instead of the relentlessness of the first The Grudge we get a more slow-building sense of dread which comes to more of a dramatic finale.
Grudge 2 sticks with the convoluted timeline & short episodes approach (which I find reallly refreshing having seen sooo many conventionallly structured horror movies) but introduces an element of Cronenberg-style body horror in a tour de force setpiece which builds from events early on in the film, & which keep festering in the back of the viewers' mind (with a sickening, indeed pregnant, inevitabilty).
The acting & cinematography alll seemed fine & effective to me, so I'm not sure what other reviewers are unhappy about. Also, there's clearly marked options on the DVD menu to have either subtitles or dubbing. Why you would want to watch it dubbed eludes me, but clearly some viewers have not noticed the options.
The two disc set comes with a slew of extras, including lots of luvvey-ish backslapping from the cast, but sheds light on production methods & Shimizu's methods & personality, & represents good value. We seldom get much of this kind of insight into J-Horror film making & I found it a fascinating adjunct to another effective & scary ghost story.
Sleeping with the lights on... - By: Mrs B, 04 Apr 2008 
This is very different from the U.S Grudge 2. The story shows what happens to the cast & crew after they have been filming a T.V programme inside the Ju-On house. The film moves along at a good pace & there is little time to recover between scary scenes. Very good, very spine-chilling, try & watch it without hiding behind a cushion. Its great to find a film that can still scare you so much that you have to sleep with the lights on. This is probably not the best film to watch if you are a mum-to-be.
A sequel too far. - By: AA, 23 Jan 2008 
I have to disagree with some of the previous reviewers. Having recently re-watched both Ju-Ons (the cinematic versions) I think this is a hugely inferior film. It doesn't have the atmosphere or chills of the first, although this must partly be due to the fact that we have already been exposed to the first film. I think that Ju-On was reallly a film to stand on its own & does not need a sequel. Right from the start of this I found myself getting bored & wanting to watch something else.
(BTW I know that Ju-On is a remake of an 80s TV movie, but having never seen it I can't reallly comment on that.)
Just a bit more of the same .... - By: Movie Lover, 23 Jan 2008 I reallly enjoyed the first Ju-On (Grudge) movie & found it genuinely scary. What a shame the same can't be said for this sequel.
If you've not seen the first instalment then you might find this scary in places - however if you have seen the first - you won't!
There is no story build-up as there is with the original & the imagery is exactly the same in both movies so there's nothing to surprise you.
A real disappointment.
In my opinion; this is easily as great - and perhaps even more terrifying - than the first instalment. - By: Jonathan James Romley, 30 Oct 2007 By now, most audiences will be fairly familiar with the Japanese series of films known as Ju On: The Grudge; the phenomenallly successful saga that began with the straight to video projects Ju On: The Curse, parts 1 & 2 - in which jealousy & adultery in a quaint Japanese suburb leads to an awful murder that marks the house for anyone who subsequently enters it - right the way through to the larger-budgeted Hollywood remake of the film & it's equallly glossy sequel. Subsequent films following on from The Curse have taken the initial murder as their starting point & created around it a film of loosely connected horror vignettes, mostly in which a series of hapless characters end up in the film's iconic haunted house & then find themselves marked for death by the two most prominent apparitions of the story.
If you have already seen the American re-make of The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Geller then there's a good chance that this follow up to the Japanese original will come as something of shock. Unlike its US counterpart, this grudge features no real central character & has no real plot development (at least, not in the traditional sense). I personallly don't see this as a bad thing, as it alllows director Takashi Shimizu to concentrate on crafting a number of scenes of gripping high tension - as the collection of disparate innocents (this time a TV crew shooting a horror film based upon the events of the original film) who unknowingly come into contact with the infamous house & then must come to terms with the unexplainable horror that is happening alll around them. However, viewers who look for things like narrative closure, explanations of plot developments & something approaching a hero that they can root for might be sorely disappointed.
As I mentioned above, this version of The Grudge instead strings together a series of inter-woven scenes that establish the significance of the curse whist setting up a number of fantastic, edge-of-your seat moments of haunted house horror. This isn't a gritty gore-fest with annoying, smug, ultra-cynical characters (as seems to be the trend with much contemporary horror - think Wolf Creek, Hostel, Cabin Fever, The Hills Have Eyes remake & 28 Weeks Later) but rather, the kind of horror that should appeal to anyone who has had to walk home late at night through an empty park & felt the presence of someone (or something) following closely behind. Your heart starts racing as you quicken your step & become convinced that you can hear footsteps rapidly approaching from the left of your shoulder! When you finallly pick up the courage to turn around & look, you realise your mind has been playing tricks on you, but the thrill was still heart-stopping regardless.
I prefer this kind of horror, which is why I'm such a huge fan of the horror films coming out of Japan, China & North Korea; great works like The Eye trilogy, Wishing Stairs, Abnormal Beauty, Premonition, Infection, Chaos, A Tale of Two Sisters & Takashi Shimizu's own Grudge-follow up Reincarnation. It's slow moving & slow building, almost ambient even; often coming at you from the rear speakers rather than full & on in your face, which for me, reallly creates a great, eerie atmosphere that works perfectly if you're watching it at 1:30 AM & have to pause for a toilet break & to let the dog out to stretch her legs.
Unlike a lot of his American contemporaries, Takashi Shimizu realises that horror isn't about what you see, but what you don't see, & with this in mind he saves any prolonged glimpses of our ghostly antagonists until right towards the very end. He also manages to create a wonderful feeling of isolation, alienation & hopeless emptiness; not only from the haunted house so central to the story, but even in the brightly-lit suburban streets, schools, office blocks & apartment buildings that our characters inhabit. The film is also shot very simply & traditionallly, with none of the hyper-cutting & frantic camera movements of western horror, which again, gives the Grudge a more believable & authentic feeling that only heightens the senses of horror & tension. This is also helped by the wonderful performances of the cast who manage to ably convey the right sense of fraught emotion without descending into screaming histrionics.
For me, The Grudge 2 is easily as great the first instalment; although some viewers may find the more outrageous elements of the closing scenes to be a little too much (I'm guessing the planned third instalment will pick up on & explain some of these ideas, but we'll have to wait & see). This is horror for those who want chills rather than spills, & those who like to invest some serious time in something that is slower, more deliberate & more dramatic than the usual stalk & slash type stuff (not that I don't love that kind of horror as well, but it's nice to have an intelligent alternative). As mentioned previously, there will be some viewers who won't want to invest their time in such a film that has no obvious sense of narrative & no single identifiable character, but at the end of the day, that's their decision. But they're clearly missing out!
