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58Once again, we're treated to loosely aligned scenes of half-formed characters getting a faceful of director Takashi Shimizu's croaking, implacable, and, yes, still scary housewife-geist.
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50While The Grudge 2 feels like a second-generation copy - a little faded, with less impact than the first - there are still plenty of moments that will linger in your nightmares.
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50There are fun distractions, but it's easy to focus on the flaws.
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Those ghosts might want to find a new vocation, because their work here is done.
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50Generating gore-free unease through sound effects and scary faces is the specialty of director Takashi Shimizu, who helmed the original series (known in Japan as Ju-On). He creates some unsettling moments here, particularly a well-staged scene involving a body under the sheets and a man in a shower, but the evil ghost itself is a predictable, one-trick pony.
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42While the film deserves some credit for creating and sustaining a creepy atmosphere, it doesn't matter much when the plot doesn't go anywhere, and here, it winds toward the most arbitrary, nonsensical final scene in recent memory. But, hey, they're ghosts. They can do some pretty crazy shit.
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40Despite some nifty Japanese style tricks and ghostly illusions this isn't scary. It's muddled, same-old mayhem, just with a more international cast going crazy.
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This is not the cool, eerie déjà vu, but the "Hey, isn't that exactly what happened in the first movie?" déjà vu.
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40Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.
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40Story is incidental here, as auds merely anticipate the scares.
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40A movie so bewildering and impenetrable that I believe it siphoned off a good 40 IQ points.
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38The film pulls off a couple of "gotchas!", but the subtle creepiness of its predecessors is gone, replaced by a sense of numbing predictability.
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38The most popular facial expression for victims in The Grudge 2 is something I'd like to call "deep befuddlement." This time "deep befuddlement" goes double for paying customers.
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20The same problems that plagued the original are on display here. Most notably, the lack of any coherent plot. Lots of creepy kids jump out at us, but these scenes are never satisfactorily meshed into the story itself.
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20Americans are befuddled by the inexplicable, and they demand explanations. With The Grudge 2 Shimizu delivers them and thus defangs the horror, leaving us in a well-lit room, pining for the shadows.
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0Utter junk.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 27
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Mixed: 4 out of 27
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Negative: 13 out of 27
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