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Shelf Beauties
by Willie Waffle
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The
Grudge 2
The
Grudge 2 was
so bad, people who won tickets to see the
movie at the same time I did started laughing and leaving throughout
the movie. I call them The Lucky Ones.
Amber Tamblyn stars as Aubrey
Davis – a young woman from
California who must head off to Japan when her sister, Karen (Sarah
Michelle
Gellar), is held in a hospital after apparently killing her boyfriend
and
setting a weird, haunted house on fire in the process (that’s
roughly what
happened in The
Grudge, for
those who forgot, or worked as hard as I did to wipe those memories
from your brain).
As soon as she arrives, Aubrey starts to realize something just
ain’t
right, so she teams up with a reporter, Eason (Edison Chen), who is
equally
curious about the strange events that take place in that house, and how
everyone who goes into it DIES!
Can they get to the bottom of it
all before the grudge kills
them? Will they go into the house?
The
Grudge 2 doesn’t even try to make sense as the
evil
ghosts show up everywhere! They’re
in Tokyo! They’re in the
haunted house! They’re
at the hospital! They’re
in Chicago!
They’re at the snack bar buying a bucket
of popcorn and a super size
soda! They’re
sitting behind you in the
theater talking all the way through the movie (no, that’s
just the typical
idiot you always get stuck next to)!
Sadly,
this just serves as more evidence that writer Stephen Susco has no
desire to create
something interesting, intellectually challenging, comprehensible or even
mildly entertaining.
Director Takashi Shimizu does a fantastic
job scaring the
audience with quick, shocking flashes of images and giving us clues as
to when
something freaky is going to happen.
You
have to always look in the background, in the mirror, and around the
corner. Even then, Shimizu
makes the action happen in surprising
ways. However, it
all becomes cheap
thrills due to a story that barely exists.
Susco practically admits he
can’t come up with enough of a
story to drive the movie forward by sticking us with several stories,
none of
which are fully developed, appear to go together or contribute to an
overall
mystery and plot that would keep the audience interested on anything
other than
a blood thirsty level. In
addition to
Aubrey chasing answers to what happened to her sister, some school
girls go to
the house, and have some creepy stuff start to happen.
Then, a family in Chicago seems
to be afflicted for vague
reasons (when did the ghosts/grudge learn how to get past Homeland
Security at
O’Hare? Are
they part of the Axis of
Evil?). You would
think a character in
the movie would try to explain all of this, or figure it out for the
audience,
but no. That would
be too hard.
Worst
of all, Susco adheres to no rules whatsoever when it
comes to the actions of the grudge.
At
first, you have to go into the haunted house to be afflicted. Then, the grudge just
starts going after
anyone it darn well wants to, and people are getting all grudged for no
reason. Which is it?
Why does it change?
Should it
change?
Rules
contribute to solving the mystery and making the
audience wonder why everything is happening the way it is (and giving
us some
sort of closure), but, since Susco can’t come up with any
mystery until it is
way too late, I guess he just wants to play it fast and loose so
Shimizu can
get all imaginative with how characters get whacked, which is the only
reason
people will want to go to The
Grudge 2.
1 Waffle (Out Of 4)
Copyright
2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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