Sarah Michelle Gellar

Don’t waste your money on this one.

The group of friends with whom I went to see The Grudge 2 looked around blankly as the screen faded out and mouthed, “That’s it?”

Yes, that was it, and no, you do not want to pay $7 to get to that point.

Sequels, especially in the horror genre, can be difficult to successfully make. The monster has been revealed and the characters from the first movie are generally dead. The shock value is gone.

That said, The Grudge 2 doesn’t try to showcase a coherent story, let alone answer questions audiences had from its predecessor. The only story end that is tied up is why that ghost girl makes a belching noise before she kills people, and that comes ten minutes before the movie ends.

The Grudge 2 picks up where the first left off - Sarah Michelle Gellar reprises her role as Karen Davis, the girl who miraculously survived the vengeful ghosts that haunt a creepy house in Japan. She is locked in a hospital ward because officials think she killed her boyfriend and set the house on fire.

Karen’s mother sends her other daughter Aubrey, played by Amber Tamblyn, to bring Karen back home. Aubrey then begins to discover the secrets of the house, assisted by a journalist named Eason.

Two other storylines are fighting for screen time here, both equally boring and barely connected. In the first, two schoolgirls pressure a third to enter the house and then lock her in the closet. They escape, but are cursed afterward, as is everyone who enters the house. The second focuses on a family in Chicago of all places, who is hearing mysterious noises coming from the apartment down the hall.

What little scares director Takashi Shimuzu could garner from these convoluted plotlines are undercut by the horrible special effects that include, at one point, a girl getting strangled by a ghost’s hair in a telephone booth.

The laughable logic of the first movie has been not only tossed aside, but chucked to the ground and stomped flat. Apparently, in this movie, the curse follows its victim everywhere and then has the right to kill whomever they come in contact with, regardless of whether they stepped foot in the house. It can also drag its victims into the house, even if they were just waiting around outside.

The twist ending isn’t engaging or explanatory enough to even partially redeem the movie. Shimuzu insults the audience by employing the exact flashback sequence he used in the first, right down to the camera panning to the face of the protagonist as realization dawns. The Grudge 2 is celluloid redundancy.