Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that, while this teen-targeted horror sequel features relatively little actual gore, the scary scenes are tense and aggressive, with loud soundtrack effects, jarring editing, and insinuated violence. There's some brief nudity (male and female characters appear in showers and bathtubs) and a scene that sets up sexual activity (a couple goes to a hotel room and begin to undress) but doesn't deliver because the ghost strikes. Ghost attacks throughout the movie are discordant and sometimes alarming. The ghosts are very creepy looking, shadows and noises establish scary spaces, and characters scream and show fear and pain repeatedly. There is some actual violence (someone is slammed with a frying pan in the first scene, and murders are referred to repeatedly), as well as lots of abstract and menacing visual references to violence: blood on the walls and on a couple of faces, a broken neck in a contorted ghost figure, and drowned bodies.
Families can discuss the idea of revenge. Why do people want to inflict pain on and get "even" with those who they think have wronged them? Does revenge ever help you feel better, or does it just prolong the bad feelings and pain? How do Aubrey's relationships with her sister and mother suffer in the context of revenge? Families can also talk about the enduring appeal of ghost stories and their own views on whether strong emotions can continue to "occupy" a place.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Cynthia Fuchs
Rethinking the very concepts of remake, sequel, and translation, THE GRUDGE 2 isn't a regular horror movie -- or even a regular J-horror movie. Instead, it's several intertwined, fragmented stories, told out of linear time and insistent on the interlocking effects of violence, vengeance, and "grudges."
Aubrey Davis (Amber Tamblyn) wants to please her ailing, angry mother (Joanna Cassidy), even though she knows it's impossible. So when Aubrey learns that her sister, Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar, star of the first movie) is in a hospital in Tokyo, she does what their mother asks and flies to Japan to get Karen back.
Aubrey's efforts are bound up in a tangle of causes and effects: Director Takashi Shimizu's seventh film in the Ju-on/Grudge series is actually a series of events that must be assembled by the viewer at the end -- the events occur at different times, or maybe at the same time, but they most definitely don't occur in linear time.
Ambitious and clever, the film actually has three storylines that deal with the theme of vengeance that has shaped all of the movies in the Ju-on franchise. In addition to Aubrey's trip to Japan, the movie follows the experiences of a Chicago family and a set of Tokyo schoolgirls. In Chicago, Trish (Jennifer Beals) moves in with Bill (Christopher Cousins), who has two children, Lacey (Sarah Roemer) and Jake (Matthew Knight), from a previous relationship. All will suffer the effects of the Grudge curse, though the film doesn't reveal how they're affected until the end.
Trish's family arrangement repeats -- but also refracts -- that of the original Grudge family. The Japanese family appears again in grainy video images, signaling both their existence in the past and their continuing presence in a perpetual loop. Insanely jealous husband Takeo (Takashi Matsuyama) again breaks his wife Kayako's (Takako Fuji) neck and drowns his young son Toshio (Ohga Tanaka); these original victims become the ghosts who terrorize new prey. Among these are schoolgirls Miyuki (Misako Uno), Vanessa (Teresa Palmer), and Allison (Arielle Kebbel), who come to the family's house on a dare and then pay dearly.
But for all its jump-out-at-you surprises, grim shadows, and anguished victims, The Grudge 2 isn't very scary. More abstract art than conventional horror cinema, it's more interested in parsing the idea of repetition and the basis and method of revenge. Rejecting formula by reconsidering formula, it is, perversely, singular.
Families who like this movie should see the original Japanese Ju-on and The Ring.
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Sexual ContentGirls roll up school-uniform skirts to "show off legs" glimpses of nudity in tub/shower (long shot of boy from side and back; close ups of girl's face in shower as she's frightened); a high school girl and her boyfriend rent a hotel room for sex, but she disappears before they can do it (she mistakes ghost under the covers with her for boyfriend -- creepy suggestion that the ghost is tickling/touching her below her waist). |
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ViolenceMurders and disturbing disappearances; frequent jump-scenes; scene shows woman throwing hot grease on her husband, then smashing his head with a frying pan (bloody dead face visible in subsequent/repeat scene); repeated scary images of ghost faces and sounds of ghost's screams; a young boy is terrorized by ghosts and the sight of his father's corpse in the kitchen; ghost hands repeatedly take hold of victims' faces and pull them away to offscreen horror; a body falls off a roof, landing with thud in front of a horrified character; a man holds keys so tightly that his hand is bloody; a father breaks his wife's neck and drowns his young son (these legendary first murders are repeated in the original and other forms); very brief look at the "stair ghost" (jerky movements/contortions). |
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LanguageMild language ("hell"). |
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Social BehaviorGhosts bent on revenge; victims consistently tempt fate by entering the "haunted house" they're instructed not to enter. Strong female characters. |
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