Director: Takashi Shimizu
Year: 2006
Country: USA/Japan
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Ghosts
Plot:
Flying to Japan after the house fire, a woman learns of her sisters' involvement in the legendary curse about the vengeful ghost that had originally enveloped her and joins up with several others afflicted with the curse to finally put a stop to it when it becomes apparent they're now involved.
Review:
This one here was quite a jumbled and disappointing effort. Frankly, the biggest issue with this is the three-story structure of the plot here, which tends to really affect this one by making it nearly impossible to tell what's going on here as it jumps around to the different areas and time periods in the story. By presenting all of the stories running coherently alongside each other, it manages to derail the budding suspense and tension from each segment by then switching around to another story just when it should've stayed on the other story. As well, there's the rather disappointing aspect here on this one turning into one of the story's simply for a shock scare or ghost attack, which is quite predictable when it renders the effectiveness of the whole switch apparent from the start.
There's also the point of coming in with a useless plot point of the material potentially cheating, which has very little value or even connection to the ghostly actions in the other stories, all of which lower this enough to balance out the film's positives. The main one here is the film's heavy use of ghostly activity, which gets a lot of enjoyable action here with all the insanely creepy encounters. The first encounter in the closet is pretty chilling, the hospital scenes are quite dark and haunting, with the ghost continually stalking after her in the hallways to the disbelieving staff, and the series of incidents in the apartment next door all manage to be quite a strong series of encounters that build up to even greater, more chilling encounters in the latter half.
The sequence in the dark room, appearing from the spreading ink-stain in the photograph to rise head-first from the water solution, a spectacular scene in a hotel room where it attacks and abducts a victim from in front of a clueless patron who is unaware of the whole situation and lastly, a great abduction sequence in the final moments that sets up a fantastic jump scare. The other plus here is the rather impressive facet that this does in really weaving the story lines together in the final minutes. The concept of doing this in the way it does might be problematic and flawed, but the storyline problems are quite well-executed to really bring out a rather more involved plot that's far darker and more chilling than it initially appears, so there's a lot of impressive action within here. There are what hold this one up against its flaws.
Overview: ***/5
An impressive if slightly flawed sequel, this one comes off incredibly well for what it is, as there's not much here to raise it up over the watchable level due to its issues. Those who enjoyed the original, are fans of the franchise, or who are fans of the creative crew will have the most to like, while most others out there should heed caution until they've seen the first one.
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