Hey folks, Harry here... Sam Raimi is remaking JUON - the original film, and now... the sequel is already in theaters. I haven't seen either feature yet, but I've seen the TV show JUON 1 and JUON 2 - and both of those were pretty damn creepy... albeit a bit disjointed and unintelligible upon first viewing... which could've been the result of bad subtitle translation and my ignorance of the Japanese language... because I'm a stupid American kinda half learned one alternate language because the world revolves around my country and our customs thus requiring it all to be translated for us, because... well who has the time to learn all those languages... right? I really wish I knew Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Russian and wish my Spanish was better.
Hey Harry, DJ Sk. here. Here's my review of JUON 2, aka THE GRUDGE 2, aka VENGEFUL CURSE 2:
The evil ghosts of Juon are back. Pale Toshio and his grim mother with her low, throaty rattling sound and long dark Sadako hair. These are not ghosts that can be reasoned with or fought in any way. They will kill anyone that crosses their path. In some cases they will ignore the flow of time and begin haunting you before you even encounter them (not really fair, in my opinion, but that's just how evil they are). There is absolutely no escape. There is also little explanation for their hatred of the living or why Toshio sometimes appears as a cat.
The Juon (aka The Grudge, aka Vengeful Curse) films don't aspire to great depths of story, plotting, or character. They only aspire to scare audiences, and at that they succeed. Hideo Nakata's Joyuu Rei slowly built up to the climactic "ghost attack" and he has since followed that formula in each of his supernatural films. Takashi Shimizu says screw slow build up. His Juon and Juon 2 are more like the last 20 minutes of Joyuu Rei/Ring/Dark Water looped: Character sees ghost. Character is afraid. Ghost attacks. Character dies. Change character. Repeat. The focus is on ghost action and lots of it.
Like Juon, Juon 2 is non-linear. The film is divided into segments captioned by the names of the people being haunted, with lots of overlap. Even though we saw a character killed earlier, they may appear in a diner later in someone else's segment.
The story begins with B movie "horror queen" actress Kyoko and her fiance driving late at night, talking about Kyoko's pregnancy. Unfortunately they hit a cat in the road and stop the car in the middle of nowhere. (Viewers of the first film of course remember that the pale ghost boy Toshio sometimes takes the form of a cat.) While stopped, Kyoko looks under the car and sees the pale legs of a young boy... but when she looks up no one is there. Look under the car: pale legs. Look up: no one's there. If this seems inventive and creepy to you, Juon 2 will scare the living shit out of you. For everyone else, Juon 2 is a movie that will make you mildly nervous when walking through dark rooms alone late at night after watching it, but that's about it. It's a good, fun movie, and not much more.
Within minutes, the couple has a car accident. They're both wounded. He's knocked out. Blood is running out of her dress, down her leg. She screams like Sissy Spacek and we cut to the hospital, where we learn that he's apparently in a coma and she has lost her child.
But at her next checkup the doctor says her child is fine... Something's not right. Can she stop, stop the rebirth of evil itself?
There's more of a connection between characters in this film than the previous one, which makes it easier to follow. The focus is on the makers of a documentary about the house from Juon 1 and the multitude of deaths tied to it. Kyoko was a special guest in the documentary. Others that will suffer the ghosts' wrath are the host, makeup artist, and director. Innocent bystanders will also get caught up in the ghost action.
The best segments in the film involve the host of the documentary (who is hearing strange knocking/thumping sounds from the wall in her apartment, a wall against the side of the building with nothing on the other side except air) and a junior high school extra in one of Kyoko's films (who finds herself transported Hyde-White-like back and forth between her everyday reality and a reality where she's in the haunted house). Of all the segments, these two play the most loosely with time.
Thankfully there is no "let's split up and investigate that noise" or "I better get the lid to this gas can" stupidity. There's also surprisingly few startle scares.
I believe Juon 1 to be the better of the two theatrical films (I haven't seen the straight-to-video versions). I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my horror movies creepy. Juon 1 is much more creepy, spends a lot more time at the house where the original murders took place, and has the great moment when the police confront the ghost. Juon 2, while easier to follow and inventive and playful with time, has a boring subplot about Kyoko's "ghostly" pregnancy that leads to what for me was a silly, stupid climax. It also breaks absolutely little cinematic ground and almost every scene reminded me of other films... from bodies hanging from the ceiling (sans yo-yo) to jerky sped-up/slowed down camera ghost walks to closeup shots of an eye bordered by dark hair. Both are films that would not exist without Nakata's Ring and both know it.
This is the summer popcorn movie equivalent of Japanese ghost films. Which means it's still better than 95% of recent American horror movies.
DJ Sk.
