‘The Grudge 2’: Film holds grudge against audience

I like horror movies as much as the next guy. O.K., I probably like them a lot more than the next guy and that is why movies like “The Grudge 2” tick me off. It shouldn’t exist, but it does and it laughs at you, while not giving you one iota of a reason for its existence while you are watching it. It has no compelling story to complete, no fun character to follow, nothing left in its arsenal after the first one and yet here it is.

Yippee!

This is usually a great time of year for the horror aficionado as movie studios trot out their wares and try to freak out audiences all around the world. We’ve seen some really good stuff come out in recent years but this year’s line-up around Halloween stinks.

• “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning” - No. I don’t want to see why Leatherface came out the way he did. The guy puts flesh on his face. It can’t be for a happy reason.

• “Saw III” - I’m no math specialist, but you can chart the decline of this series and know that this one is not going to be any good. One had a great plot twist, two had Donnie Wahlberg (ehh) and three simply has more gruesome torture scenes.

• “The Grudge 2” - Japanese ghosts continue to haunt people with annoying sounds and really pale hands and faces.

I could find no compelling reason not to choose this film over the others though.

That’s not a ringing endorsement for this film and neither is this review. “The Grudge 2” is the worst type of sequel there is because it is basically the same thing as the first one. That means this movie once again has a pale Japanese boy meowing/howling like a cat and a pale Japanese woman sounding like she’s burping the alphabet really slowly. More stupid people go into the haunted house, even though now it is very obvious that really bad things happen to anybody who sets foot in there.

Seriously, one character, a journalist, is particularly dumb and I really take offense at that portrayal. He has been following the case for years and has a huge file on all the bad stuff and yet, who goes inside when his story has hit a wall?
Duh, just quit and become a barista, dude.

Another reason why this is a crummy sequel is that it boasts the return of the star from the original, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and she is in it for all of five minutes. Her big sequence isn’t all that interesting either and, like everything in the movie, you see most of the “scares” coming from a mile away.

Just like the original, “The Grudge 2” weaves various timelines together and while it worked in the first film to disorient and creep the viewer out, it was confusing for a small portion of this film and then it just became really obvious and aggravating that the filmmakers thought they still had the audience in the dark.

Oh yeah, for anyone who cares, here’s the plot.

Basically, a murder happened in this house in Japan and the lady who died was so ticked off that she has come back as a ghost and wants anyone who sets foot in the house to know her pain and misery. The sister of Gellar’s character comes to Japan to bring her back home and after Gellar’s character dies, she starts to try to solve the mystery with the idiotic journalist. Meanwhile the film also follows some high school students who go in the house for a laugh and then people in Chicago who are suffering from “The Grudge” too.

How? Well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who makes it out of Japan and brings “The Grudge” with her.

Here’s the scariest part of the whole movie, aside from the girl who drinks a half gallon of milk and then throws it back up into the bottle (and that wasn’t really scary, it was just gross), one character says something like this to another, “Once it has started, it cannot be stopped.”

Please don’t let there be a “The Grudge 3.” Tell the pale Japanese lady that I feel her pain and really couldn’t possibly take any more.

*1/2