FREE: GRUDGE GRUDGE GELLAR,SARAH MICHEL used

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The Grudge 2 is a spooky installment in Takashi Shimizu's
hardworking Ju-on/Grudge series of horror pictures. It doesn't
carry the disorienting thrill of the very first Japanese Ju-on
features, but it's a lot creepier than anybody could have
expected. The story picks up from the end of the first
Hollywood version of The Grudge, and has nothing to do with
Ju-on 2, Shimizu's Japanese sequel. Sarah Michelle Gellar
returns (a distinctly supporting role) as an American woman
traumatized by her experiences with a haunted house in Tokyo;
younger sister Amber Tamblyn flies over to help out. This
particular storyline doesn't have much meat on it; the murder
house is still there, and people who go inside have a
disconcerting habit of dropping dead. Fortunately, two other
plots thread into the basic one: a group of American schoolgirls
in Tokyo become intrigued by the legend of the house, and
some Chicago apartment dwellers are unsettled by domestic
anxiety and the weird sounds coming from next door. (This
storyline, featuring Jennifer Beals, gives the film its extremely
satisfying opening sequence.) As usual with these movies,
sequences come to us in non-chronological order, and it's up to
us to piece it together. You can guess where the film is going,
but the slow trajectory toward its final sequences is
surprisingly involving. The movie was widely panned upon its
release, which says more about the presumption of the law of
diminishing sequel returns than the film itself--it's a decent
little horror flick. --Robert Horton