Actress Kyoko (Noriko Sakai) is being driven home from work one night by her fiancé Masashi (Ayumu Saitô) and she's worried about the baby she is carrying. Something happens to the radio's reception and Kyoko insists on turning it off, but that's not the strangest thing as suddenly the car hits an object in the road and they stop to see what it was. Masashi gets out and investigates, calling to Kyoko that it was just a cat and returns to the car - but what was the figure doing that approached the corpse as he walked away? Resuming their drive, they are shaken but that emotion turns to terror when Kyoko notices a small, pale child crouched by her fiancé's feet, holding onto the steering wheel...
If you enjoyed the first theatrical instalment in the Ju-On series, even if you enjoyed the American remake of it, you should find much to admire in this follow up which took much the same journey with a different cast. The story remains the same as writer and director Takashi Shimizu fashions a selection of vignettes all with the same theme of a very real supernatural curse running out of control and claiming the lives of its victims in a variety of (he hopes) unsettling ways. Not as baffling as some would have you believe, once you adjust to its style of concentrating on each character in turn it proves very watchable.
The outcome of seeing a small, black-eyed child hiding in your car is of course, a crash, and when Kyoko comes to she realises she has had a miscarriage, as if the accident wasn't bad enough as now Masashi is in a coma. She gets out of hospital relatively soon, but strange things are happening, all centred around the apparition of the boy. And even stranger than glimpsing the ghost, a doctor tells her that she is still three months pregnant - but how? She doesn't argue for some reason and instead goes home looking worried - as she should be judging by what occurs near the end of the film.
We find out that the house from the first film is being used by a television crew to make a documentary there all about the murders that triggered the curse, not that our hapless characters realise anything about that until it's far too late. Naturally, this means the "grudge" is still active, a "grudge" that is explained in the opening as self-propagating, meaning the victims who died to start the curse off must be in a particularly spiteful state to subject everyone they encounter to the same rotten time that they have to suffer. Of course, that's what makes the hook so threatening.
Yes, turn up in the wrong place (i.e. the "House of Horrors" where the original killings took place) at the wrong time, then you're in trouble. Kyoko has to endure the death of her mother as if she didn't have enough on her plate, and then the action moves on to the presenter Tomoka (Chiharu Nîyama) who has noticed odd things going on at the apartment she shares with her boyfriend. We return to Kyoko throughout as she grows increasingly paranoid, and rightly so, as the television crew begin to either disappear or drop dead. Ranging from the comically creepy, such as the twitching killer wig, to the ingenious, such as the hanging ropes, the setpieces are as well thought out and bizarre as ever, and marks The Grudge out as one of the better horror series from Japan, if somewhat repetitive. Music by Shiro Sato.
[Contender's double disc Region 2 DVD features a wealth of interviews, documentaries and a gallery to keep you occupied.]
Japanese writer/director and the man behind the hugely successful Ju-on films. Ju-on and Ju-on 2 were made for TV, while 2003's Ju-on: The Grudge was a bigger budget feature film, which Shimizu sequalised the same year. In 2004 directed a Hollywood version of the story, as the Sam Raimi-produced The Grudge, which he followed with The Grudge 2 before finally opting for alternative tales.
