The Grudge 2 (2006)

Summary: Karen is lying in a hospital room, suspected of killing her boyfriend and trying to burn down an infamous Japanese house. Her sister leaves her life in America to find Karen and in the meantime solve the mysteries of the house. She’s gonna have a hard time succeeding when the spirits of the deceased want desperately to get out of that house. Problem is…they will.           Overall: In a lot of ways this film basically gives us similar scares to the first film, but my defense of this is…the house ain’t that big to begin with. There isn’t much else to do in that house to keep a sequel original so the director has to do what he can…move everything into new settings. And so we get this film with basically three distinct storylines rolling around: 1) Karen and her sis; 2) 3 school girls; 3) A family of four in Chicago. By the end of the film, you should figure out how everything connects and how the time is arranged. I’ll give you that it can be confusing...and frankly, don’t close your eyes or you could miss it. But it’s got some good scares regardless. Yeah, yeah, I know that in some sense it’s the same exact scares that you have seen before but they do some nice tricks and some off focus work to keep it interesting. I say “go watch this” because it’s worth a shot.           As for the deleted scenes in the “Unrated Director’s Cut” version of the film, got some interesting stuff here. The first one focuses on the situation with Allison and Eason in terms of our revolving circular time frame. I’d have liked this added so it eased the “shock” of the ending’s “revelation.” A few of the others, involving Aubrey were sorta in the “didn’t matter” category. It neither helped nor hurt the pacing of the film. Now we do have an alternate ending though which although was fine...until we shift from the apartment with Allison and Jake to Aubrey’s mom house and the package in the mail and the “tribble” that pops out of it. Now that’s cheesy. The ending in the film is easily the better, more cohesive way to go.           Comparison: The Grudge meets Uncle Buck

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